The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Novalis The Seer. The Mystery of Christmas

[ 1 ] From time to time, people arise who see what has been felt in the hearts and souls of thousands upon thousands for many centuries. Only those who live with what we have gained in our more recent times through the insights of the secret sciences know that what thousands upon thousands have felt can be seen at any time by seers, that what has come about as a result of the event at Golgotha, which illuminates our entire development, can be seen.

[ 2 ] Through what happened at Golgotha, the entire spiritual sphere of our earth has been transformed. And since then, whenever the seer's inner eye is opened even a little by the feelings that can connect us with the event of Golgotha, he sees the consequence of this event: the everlasting presence of the Christ power, which has been incorporated into the spiritual sphere surrounding the earth since that time. The others feel and sense, when they struggle through the great truths and the powerful impulses of the proclamation of the event of Golgotha, the power of this fact. They feel that since that time, the human heart can experience something different than before on earth; they know that something is there that could not be felt in the same way before. And the seer sees this.

[ 3 ] Such a seer, called to be a seer through the grace of spiritual-divine powers, one might almost say through a miracle, was the German young poet Novalis. Through an event that shook him deeply, teaching him as if by magic the relationship between life and death, his spiritual eye was opened, and in addition to the great retrospective view of the past of the Earth and the worlds, the Christ Being also came before this spiritual eye. He was able to say of himself in relation to this Christ being that he belonged to those who had seen with their spiritual eyes what is revealed when the “stone is lifted” and the being becomes visible who has provided the proof for our earthly existence that life in the spiritual realm always conquers death.

[ 4 ] We cannot really call Novalis a human being who had a life, but rather something like a memory of a former life. With his initiation, which was granted to him as if by grace, everything he had achieved in previous incarnations dawned on him at the same time; it was actually only a great gift of the synthesis of insights he had gained in a previous life. And because he had the ability to look back on those times and see with spiritual eyes, he was able to say that the great event of discovering what Christ is within himself was incomparable in his life. It is an experience like a repetition of the event at Damascus, where Paul, who until then had persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus and had not obeyed their proclamation, received through higher vision the immediate proof that He is there and lives, that something has happened through the event at Golgotha, which stands alone in the entire development of humanity. Thus, those whose eyes have been opened can see this event repeated. Christ was not merely present in the body in which He lived. He remained connected to the earth; the power of the sun connected itself to the earth through Him.

[ 5 ] Novalis therefore calls the revelation he received “unique,” and he calls only those people who want to participate in this event with their whole soul to be truly human. He rightly says that even the spiritually glorious ancient India would profess Christ if it only recognized this Christ. And he says from his knowledge, not from his intuition, not from blind faith, but from his knowledge that the Christ whom he has seen spiritually is the same as that which permeates all beings as a force. And the eye comes to recognize this force when this force works within it. The eye that sees Christ is formed by the power of Christ. The Christ force in the eye sees the Christ outside the eye.

[ 6 ] What a wonderfully great and powerful word! And Novalis also recognizes that powerful connection, that what we call Christ, since the event at Golgotha, is the planetary spirit of the Earth, the Earth spirit, which will increasingly transform the Earth's body. And a wonderful view of the future opens up to Novalis: he sees the Earth transformed; he sees the Earth of today, which still contains the remnants of ancient times, transformed into the body of Christ; he sees everything that flows in the Earth as liquids permeated by the blood of Christ, and he sees everything that is rock in the Earth as the flesh of Christ. He sees the body of the earth gradually merging into the body of Christ. And in a wondrous interaction, the oneness of all that is earth and Christ is revealed to him: the earth in the future as a great organism in which man will be embedded and whose soul is Christ.

[ 7 ] From this point of view, Novalis, deeply moved by his secret scientific knowledge, calls Christ the Son of Man. Just as human beings are in a certain sense the sons of the gods, that is, the sons of the ancient gods who shaped our planet over millions and millions of years, who built the houses in which we live and the ground on which we walk, so man will have to build, out of himself, by overcoming the earthly, an earth that will be the body of the new God, the future God. And when ancient times looked back to the ancient holy gods, wanting to be united with them in death, Novalis recognizes the God who will one day carry in his body all that is best in us and all that we can sacrifice to the body of Christ. He recognizes in Christ that to which humanity sacrifices itself in order to have a body. He recognizes in this, in the higher cosmological sense, the “Son of Man.” He calls Christ the “God of the future.”

[ 8 ] All these are feelings of such significance that they are well suited to bring our souls into the right Christmas spirit. And so let us now allow him who lived at the end of the 18th century, a short life, who died at the age of twenty-nine, to describe his feelings as they became connected in his life with the greatest event of his life: the unique, great insight into the Christ being.

[ 9 ] Here Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) recited the poem “Wenn alle untreu werden ...” (“When all become unfaithful ...”) from the “Spiritual Songs.”

[ 10 ] It is not long since the Christmas tree became the symbol of the Christmas festival. One has not yet found a poem about the Christmas tree by a poet such as Schiller, for example, who would undoubtedly have felt the poetry of the Christmas tree if it had existed at the time, and who would not have found it difficult to write a poem about it. The Christmas tree did not yet exist in our form at that time. It is a recent creation. People celebrated this festival in other ways before, and as far back as we can look in the course of time, we will find something like Christmas everywhere, as long as people exist in their present form or in the form that led to their present form. We will find it among the broad masses of people everywhere, we will find it up to the heights of mystery in ever new forms.

[ 11 ] The very fact that Christmas is so ancient and our present symbol for it so new shows us that something eternal is connected with this festival, but an eternity that brings forth ever new forms from its bosom. Truly, as old as humanity is on earth, so old is Christmas, so old are the feelings symbolized by this festival. But humanity will always have the power to find an outward expression for this festival in new, rejuvenated symbols appropriate to the times. Just as nature rejuvenates itself every year, its eternal forces springing forth in ever new forms, so the symbols of Christmas devotion are constantly rejuvenated, thus revealing the eternal and constant nature of this festival. And so, in this solemn Christmas hour, let us stand before our souls with that which can arise when we walk the path that can show us a little of how people actually felt in the time we now celebrate as our Christmas season.

[ 12 ] As students of spiritual science, we can go back far, far into the distant past. We go back to those times when our souls were embodied in ancient Atlantean bodies, bodies that bore little resemblance to our present bodies. At that time, there were great teachers of humanity who were also the leaders of humanity. People looked at the world differently back then. It was not the bright sun of the day that showed them the shapes of external objects and the natural world in sharp contours and distinct lines. Everything around man was shrouded in mist, not only because a large part of the Atlantean world was also covered with masses of fog and the sunlight could not yet penetrate the fog as it did later, but also because man's powers of perception had not yet developed to the point where he could see external objects in clear outlines. When humans woke up in the morning and wanted to perceive the external world, God's nature around them, they saw only blurred images surrounded by colored edges, and everything seemed to be shrouded in mist. And when they fell asleep in the evening, they slept into a spiritual world. It was not that self-forgetfulness and unconsciousness surrounded humans, as is the case today when humans fall asleep.

[ 13 ] In the Atlantean era, when people slept, they saw the spiritual-divine beings who were their companions. Around them they saw all those figures that were once reality for humans, that were experiences for humans. They also saw all those figures that have been preserved in memory for the most diverse regions of the earth under the most diverse names: Wotan, Thor, Baldur, and so on, as our ancestors in Central Europe called them; Zeus, Pallas, Athena, Ares, and so on, as the people of ancient Greece called those divine-spiritual figures who had once seen their souls in ancient Atlantis. But in the Atlantean era, the divine worlds were no longer the very high, creative divine worlds from whose bosom human beings once emerged in the Lemurian era. Our souls once rose from divine beings whose glory and greatness human beings today can only guess at. These same divine beings revealed themselves to human beings from their bosom; they brought forth the spheres of the world and all the forces that surround us. Human beings were in the bosom of divine beings, whose outer expression shines down on us from the spheres, among those beings whom we see in flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder, whose expression is the plants and animals, and for whom the crystals are sense organs. Everything that reaches us like warmth, everything that surrounds us in forces, is the body of divine-spiritual beings, and man sprang from the womb of these divine-spiritual beings. The more he descended to our earth, the more he united himself with material substances, the more he integrated himself into the matter of our earth, the less his ability to see the great gods became.

[ 14 ] In primeval times, when human beings had no sensory perception, when they could not yet see with their eyes or hear with their ears, when images surged up and down in their souls, images that were not of minerals, animals, or plants, but of divine spiritual beings standing above them, human beings then emerged more and more onto the physical plane in later times. and learned to know the physical plane through the outer sense organs. In the Atlantean era, there was a kind of alternation between seeing on the physical plane and an ancient clairvoyance that remained as a remnant of the ancient spiritual glory in which humans once lived. In contrast to the very high gods, there were lower gods whom human beings could still perceive on the astral plane when they enjoyed the bliss of being a spiritual being among spiritual beings at night.

[ 15 ] The brighter the physical plane became, the less human beings were able to see on the spiritual planes. But in the ancient Atlantean era, human beings had initiates. These initiates of ancient Atlantis were able to foretell some things in addition to the deeper teachings of the ancient gods from whose bosom human beings sprang. They could foretell to human beings that there is something in the world that can be viewed in such a way that it can be made clear by the following comparison: Look at a plant seed; look at how this plant seed develops into a plant. It grows, it sprouts leaves, sepals, flowers, and fruit. Anyone standing in front of the plant can say to themselves: I am looking back at the seed; it is the creator of the leaves and the flower that stand before me, and this flower contains something within itself; this flower contains the seed of a new plant, the flower is forming into a new seed.

[ 16 ] And just as one can look into the future of the plant and look back into its past, so the great Atlantean initiates could say to their disciples, and through the voice of their disciples to the whole people: You can look back to the divine seeds in the world, from whose womb human beings sprang. What you see around you, spiritual and physical, are all leaves that have sprouted from the ancient divine seeds. See in them the powers of these ancient divine seeds, just as you can see in the leaves of plants the power of the seed from which the plant has sprung. But we can point to something else: in the future, something will spread around human beings that will be like the blossom of a plant, which is indeed the result of the ancient gods, but which contains within itself a seed, just as the blossom contains a seed and brings it to maturity, a seed that unfolds within itself the new divinity. That the world was born of gods was the ancient teaching; that the world will give birth to a god, the great god of the future, was the great prophecy of the Atlantean initiates to their disciples, and thus also to the peoples. For it was the peculiarity of the Atlantean initiates that, like all initiates, they saw the great events of the future. They looked beyond the great Atlantean flood, beyond the great event that transformed the lands of the earth. They saw behind the Atlantean era all the cultures that would spring forth in later times; they looked to the land of the holy Rishis, to the land of Zarathustra, to the culture of ancient Egypt founded by Hermes, to the foretelling of Moses; they looked to happy Greece, to mighty Rome, up to our time, and further into the future. And it was hope that they instilled in their intimate disciples.

[ 17 ] They could say this to them: You must leave all the fields of the spiritual land in which you now find yourselves. You must become entangled in matter, you must clothe yourselves completely in garments taken from physical substance. A time will come when you must work on the physical plane, where the holy old gods will seem to have vanished. But you may look back to where the new star can rise, where the new seed can sprout, the future God who has preserved himself through the ages to appear at the right time in humanity!

[ 18 ] And when the Atlantean initiates wanted to tell their disciples, and thus the whole people, why one should descend into the earthly valley, they drew their attention to the fact that one day all souls would experience and see Him who was to come, whom they could not yet see because he was in a region where the physical eye could not see him, nor could the spiritual eye that had once seen him when man still rested in the bosom of the gods.

[ 19 ] And the Atlantean flood came. The face of the earth was changed. After some time, it looked completely different. After the great migration of peoples from the West to the East, the great post-Atlantean cultures arose, the first being the culture of ancient sacred India. The teachers of ancient India, the seven holy Rishis, taught their disciples, and thus the entire Indian people, that there was a spiritual world; for the Indian people needed the teaching about the spiritual world. It was completely transferred to the physical plane, and during life on the physical plane, the eyes could only see the outer form of the physical world as the expression of the spiritual, but not the spiritual itself. But in the soul of every such Indian there was something that can be called a dark memory of what the soul had once experienced among the gods in ancient Atlantis. This memory awakened a longing, and this longing was so strong that the Indian souls could not enter into an intimate relationship with the physical plane, so that the physical plane appeared to them as Maya, as an illusion, as something unreal, and that their longing still went out toward what had been lost. The souls would not have been able to endure the physical plane if the spirit-filled rishis had not been able to proclaim the teachings of the glory of the ancient world that humanity had lost. Thus the holy Rishis were able to proclaim the teachings of the cosmos, which are little understood today, the teachings of a wisdom of ancient times, because they were initiated into what man had experienced when he was still in the bosom of the gods. Man was there when the gods separated the sun from the earth, when they assigned the spheres of the world their paths; he had only forgotten this during his later wanderings on earth.

[ 20 ] This wisdom was taught by the Rishis, but they also taught something else. It was taught to those who were already able to develop a sense of it—and these were precisely the most advanced ones—that out of this world into which man had now been cast, which now appears to him as illusion and Maya, there will spring forth the one who cannot yet be seen in this world because the soul of man is not yet ready to develop the power to recognize this being, But He will appear, He of whom the Rishis said that He was “beyond them,” “Vilva karman.” That was the name given to the being whom the ancient teachers of India proclaimed as the great Spirit of the future. You cannot yet see Him, so it was proclaimed to the Indian people, just as you cannot yet see the seed of the fruit in the blossom. But as surely as the blossom contains the seed of the fruit, so surely does Maya develop the seed of that which will make life in the physical world worth living. And what was later called Christ, the Indian teachers proclaimed in advance; they were his humble prophets. They looked in two directions: back to the world of ancient wisdom, according to whose plan the world had been created, and forward, proclaiming to everyday people that One would come who would enter human hearts and move all human hands.

[ 21 ] There was no time when He was not proclaimed, as long as human culture and human consciousness have existed. If later generations have forgotten the proclamation, it is not the fault of the great teachers of humanity.

[ 22 ] Then came the ancient Persian culture, whose leader was Zarathustra. Zarathustra was already able to tell his close disciples, and thus his people, that in everything that surrounds human beings, in what comes to us as energy from the sun, in what comes from the other stars belonging to our solar system, in everything that fills the air, there lives a being that now only shows itself to human beings in a veiled form. Zarathustra could speak to his initiates about the great solar aura, Ahura Mazdao, the good God. And he said something to his disciples that could be clarified by the following comparison: Look at a plant. It arises from the seed, develops leaves in all directions, develops the flower, but it is as if something mysterious pervades the whole plant and appears in the center of the flower as the new seed. What is around it will fall away, but the innermost power that you can see inside the flower is what you can already sense as the source of a new plant that could arise from the old one. When you contemplate the power of sunlight, and when you perceive this sunlight in such a way that you see in it only the physical expression of something spiritual, and allow yourselves to be inspired by the spiritual power of the sun, then the foretelling of the divine fruit that is to be born from the earth will dawn upon you!

[ 23 ] And when these intimate disciples had advanced further and further, they were able to participate in more secret teachings at certain times, and Zarathustra was able to paint for them in a solemn hour the picture of One who will come when human beings are ready to receive this One in their midst with understanding. Zarathustra presented his disciples with powerful images of this future being. He could show the image to one, and to another he could show a kind of reflection of it; the others could only receive in a comprehensive image what was to happen in the future.

[ 24 ] So it was also in the ancient Persian culture, in the Zarathustra culture, that the one who would later be called Christ was foretold. And it was also so in the Egyptian culture. Hermes also foretold Christ in a certain way to his Egyptian initiates and thus to the entire Egyptian people. A reflection of this foretelling of Christ can be seen in the Osiris legend. What did the Osiris legend make clear to people? The Osiris legend tells the following story: Once, in ancient times, Osiris ruled in Egypt for the happiness of his people, faithfully united with his wife Isis. Then the evil brother Set or Typhon set out to destroy Osiris. He made a chest and threw it into the sea with Osiris inside. Isis found the chest again, but she could not bring Osiris back to life on earth. He was taken up to higher regions, and since then people have only been able to see him when they have passed through the gate of death. It was made clear to every Egyptian: After death, you can be united with Osiris as your hand is united with your soul. You can one day be a member of Osiris, call him your higher self, but only if you have earned it on the physical plane. After death, you can be united with the god you call your highest.

[ 25 ] The initiate could be shown something else: when he had gone through all the trials and tests, all the lessons that had to be learned in order to look into the higher worlds, then the image of Osiris was shown to the initiate during his physical life, during the life between birth and death itself. What confronted other people when they passed through the gate of death, and with what they were to feel united, confronted the secret student of the Egyptian initiates when he was outside his body, after his etheric body, his astral body, and his ego had been taken out of the physical body. Then the one who had seen this, who had already seen Osiris during his lifetime, could proclaim to the others that Osiris lives.

[ 26 ] But in ancient Egypt it was never possible to proclaim: Osiris lives among us! This was expressed in the legend by saying: Osiris is a king who has never been seen on earth. For the “coffin” is nothing other than the physical body. At the moment when Osiris is placed in the physical body, the hostile forces of the physical world, which is not yet ready to receive the god, assert themselves so strongly that they destroy the god. The physical world is not yet ready to receive the god with whom man is to become one. But when we tell you—so said those who were able to bear personal witness that Osiris lives, with whom man is to become one in his inner being—when we tell you that God lives, only the initiated can see him when they leave the physical world. The God with whom man is to become one lives, but only in the spiritual world. Only those who leave the physical world can be united with God!

[ 27 ] It was so that human beings grew to love the physical world more and more, for it was their task to work in the physical world and to bring about culture upon culture in the physical world. To the same extent that their eyes saw more clearly, the more the mind was able to understand what was happening in the physical world, the more humans were able to know more and more and make discoveries and inventions in the physical world that made their physical lives easier, the more difficult it became for them to see between birth and death in the spiritual world. So although he could hear from the initiated that the God with whom he would unite was alive, he could take little from this world that could have made clear to him what life with Osiris in the other world would be like. Life in the higher world became increasingly obscured, so that man could only guess that the God with whom he was to become one was alive.

[ 28 ] And then came the Greek world, Greece, which was happy on the physical plane, where people entered into that wonderful marriage between spirit and matter for the physical plane. We look at the marvelous works of ancient Greece, and when we let these works appear before us, we will have a picture of how people in that time, when the event of Golgotha was to take place, related to the spiritual world. It is hard to imagine, but it is true that the high point of architecture, which is the Greek temple, corresponds to the lowest point in people's relationship to the spiritual world.

[ 29 ] Let us imagine a Greek temple standing before us. In its forms and its unity, it is the purest and noblest expression of the spiritual, so that it could once be said that God Himself dwells in the Greek temple. He was present there. For the lines that were mysteriously woven into the material were entirely appropriate to the spiritual world plan and to those lines that run through the physical plane as directions in space. And there is no purer, more beautiful, more noble interpenetration of the human spirit with physical matter than in a Greek temple. And therefore, on the physical plane, there is no other possibility than to permeate the higher world of the gods with physical matter in the way that is the case in Greek temples or in Greek works of art in general. The Greeks succeeded in making the gods of ancient times descend to them through the way they created their works of art. And even if the Greeks did not see Zeus or Pallas Athena descend, it was nevertheless the gods who were conjured into these works of art, the gods among whom people once lived in the Atlantean era and whom they saw. In ancient times, people were able to provide the old gods with a magnificent dwelling place. And now let us see what the Greek temple represents in a certain other direction. Imagine that clairvoyant consciousness stands opposite a Greek temple. What is now being said also applies to the sparse remains that still exist of the Greek temple world. Imagine that your clairvoyant consciousness stands before such a remnant as you find in the temple at Paestum: you can feel joy and bliss for life in the physical body through the harmony of the lines that form the columns and the roofs. Everything is so perfect that something divine can be imagined and felt in the physical. One can live in such a feeling when one looks through the eyes of the physical body at this harmony of Greek architecture. And now imagine the clairvoyant consciousness transported into the spiritual world. It is as if something like a black wall were drawn in front of what you can see in the physical world, and what can be seen on the physical plane is obliterated. Nothing of these marvelous glories of the physical plane can be taken over into the spiritual world. The most glorious things of the physical plane, if they are only that, are extinguished in the spiritual world. And there we understand that it is no legend when one of those who belonged to the leaders in Greece, having been met by an initiate in the other world, said: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows! Precisely in Greece, where such delights could be experienced in the physical world, the souls, when they entered the world of death, moved into a gloomy, dark shadow realm. The physical plane had become magnificent, but to the same extent the spiritual world had become desolate.

[ 30 ] And now let us compare this with two other things that can be felt in the Greek temple: let us imagine Raphael's painting “Madonna di San Sisto” or Leonardo da Vinci's “The Last Supper”! Let us imagine those works of art that were created after the events of Golgotha and into which the mysteries of Golgotha have flowed. People can feel bliss when they look at these pictures; they can pour joy into their souls. And this is also the case with clairvoyant consciousness when it views these pictures on the physical plane through its eyes. When it now transports itself into the spiritual world, it says to itself, even though it no longer sees the physical: What I take with me from what I experience in these images is not just an echo of the physical, not just the delights and bliss I experienced when I saw all this, but now all the glory dawns on me; I have only planted the seed of what I am now experiencing in greater glory and splendor! When one looks at such pictures, in which the mysteries of Golgotha have flowed in, one plants in the physical world only the seed for greater knowledge in the spiritual world. And how can all this happen? It can happen because the spiritual power that has been foretold for so long has truly appeared on earth, because humanity has come so far that it has been able to unfold a blossom within which the seed of the future God could ripen. Through the event of Golgotha, something has been communicated to earthly existence that cannot only be taken into the spiritual world, but that blossoms in the spiritual worlds in higher glory and higher bliss, and the most significant expression of this is precisely that which has already been characterized here: At the very moment when the physical body of Christ Jesus died on Golgotha, Christ appeared to those who were then between death and a new birth. He was able to proclaim to them what none of the earlier initiates had been able to proclaim when they passed over into the spiritual world.

[ 31 ] When the earlier initiates—let us take those of the Eleusinian mysteries—passed over from this world to those who were there between death and a new birth, what could the Eleusinian initiates have said to them? They could have told them about the events of the physical plane, but this would have aroused only longing and melancholy in them. For human beings had completely banished themselves to the physical plane. But they could not find the physical there, where everything had become dark and gloomy, and where he who had been a great man on the physical plane felt that he must say: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows! The initiates had nothing to bring to those who were on the physical plane, nothing to bring to those who were on the other plane at that time. Then the event of Golgotha took place, and Christ appeared among the dead. And for the first time, an event from the physical world could be proclaimed in the spiritual world, an event that marked the beginning of a transition from the physical world to the spiritual world. Like a ray of light, it flashed through the spiritual worlds when Christ appeared in the underworld. For now it was clear that proof had been provided in the physical world that the spiritual can always conquer death.

[ 32 ] From this event, it followed that it was now possible to experience something in the physical world that could be carried over into the spiritual world. What could be said about other things that were influenced by the event at Golgotha can be found in the Gospel of John and other proclamations that follow on from it. Those who enjoy the Gospel of John on the physical plane experience the bliss of understanding this great document on the physical plane. But those who then enter the spiritual world with clairvoyant awareness know that what they were able to feel in the Gospel of John was only a foretaste of what they can now absorb. This is the significance of being able to take treasures from the physical plane into the spiritual world.

[ 33 ] Since then, it has become brighter and brighter on the spiritual plane. Everything that existed in the physical world had sprouted from the spiritual world. If one passed from the physical world into the spiritual world, one could say: Here lie the causes of everything; and over there in the physical world is only what has sprouted from the spiritual world. There are only the effects, there is only the reflection from the spiritual world. Since the event at Golgotha, when one passes from the physical world into the spiritual, one says to oneself: There are also causes in the physical world, and what is experienced through the event at Golgotha on the physical plane has an effect over into the spiritual world.

[ 34 ] So it will be more and more: everything old, which is the effect of the old gods, will die, and what will blossom, what will live into the future, are the effects of the God of the future. That will live on into the spiritual world. It is like when you look at a new plant seed and say to yourself: Of course it came from an old plant. The old leaves and flowers have fallen off and disappeared, and now the new seed is there, which will develop into a new plant and a new flower. So we too live in a world where leaves and flowers fall off and seeds of gods are there. And more and more the new fruit, the fruit of Christ, unfolds, and everything else will fall away. What is conquered and achieved here in the physical world will be of value for the future insofar as it is carried over into the spiritual world, and before our spiritual eye a world will dawn in the future that has its roots in the physical, just as our world once had its roots in the spiritual world. Just as human beings are the sons of the gods, so what human beings experience in the physical world through their elevation to the event of Golgotha will form the body of the new gods of the future, whose leader is Christ. In this way, the old worlds live on in the new worlds through the complete death of the old and the sprouting and blossoming of the new from the old. But this could only happen for human beings because humanity had matured to the point where it could unfold a flower for that spiritual being who was to become the God of the future.

[ 35 ] This blossom, which was able to unfold and take in the seed of the future God, could only be a threefold human shell consisting of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, which had previously been purified and cleansed on earth through everything that could be achieved there. This shell of Jesus of Nazareth, who sacrificed himself in order to receive the Christ seed like a flower, and this flower of humanity represents the purest, the extract of what humanity has been able to bring forth in its spiritual evolutionary drive. And people can say to themselves: Only when the earth was ripe to produce the most beautiful flower could the seed of the new God appear. And the birth of this flower was in Bethlehem; this is contained in our Christmas celebration. In our Christmas celebration, we celebrate the birth of the flower that was to receive the seed of Christ.

[ 36 ] Thus, Christmas is truly a festival through which human beings can see in two ways: into the past and into the future. For out of the past has come the flower from which the seed for the future develops. Out of the old earth has come the threefold shell of Christ. From the best that human beings have been able to achieve, this threefold shell of Christ has flowed together and been born. And there is no external representation of a mystery that could initially make a more powerful impression on us than the representation of this very mystery: how the most beautiful flower of humanity could spring from the purest chalice.

[ 37 ] That humanity once emerged spiritually from the bosom of the Godhead, was divine-spiritual, and condensed into matter—how can this be represented more beautifully than by showing how gradually the spiritual condenses, how out of the indefinite darkness of the spiritual, the human being condensed out! The ancient Egyptians depicted this intuitively and prophetically as the once lion-headed goddess, who was still completely spiritual, still from the time when humans were not yet very condensed, still resting ethereally and spiritually in the bosom of the deity. As the next figure, anticipating the later “Madonna di San Sisto,” another female figure appears in the Egyptian illustration: Isis with the child Horus. Here we see how that which was born out of clouds, that is, out of the spiritual, has condensed into the chalice, into that which is to represent the human being developing into the future. But going into the purely spiritual, we see this idea, already known to the ancients, in the Christ Madonna with the baby Jesus.

[ 38 ] Raphael has breathed this mystery into life with wonderful tenderness and purity, showing how the Madonna condenses out of spiritual angel heads and in turn brings forth the flower, Jesus of Nazareth, who is to receive the Christ seed. The entire evolution of humanity is contained in a wonderful way in this image of the Madonna. It is therefore not surprising that the person who spoke first today had the most beautiful, the most glorious memories of the Madonna from the life of which his present life was a remembrance, from which he allowed all the beautiful feelings and glorious sensations to spring forth within himself that can be associated with this mystery of humanity depicted in the picture, and that these feelings passed from there to the bearer of Christ herself, to the figure who brought forth the seed, the chalice from which the flower sprouted, which was able to bring to maturity within itself the seed of the new God.

[ 39 ] And so we see how feelings vibrate in this wonderfully gifted Novalis, feelings that can be understood freely, without any bias toward this or that political party—especially in relation to this sacred mystery that took place on the first Christian Christmas and is repeated again and again in every Christian Christmas: that mystery to which the ancient initiates, in the guise of the ancient magi, offer their sacrifices and go where the new mystery took root. And they sacrifice, the wise men of ancient times, adorned with the wisdom that comes from ancient times, they sacrifice before that which is to enter into the future, which is to contain within itself the power in a human being that runs through all the worlds connected with our earth.

[ 40 ] Novalis felt the Christ mystery, the Mary mystery, in connection with the cosmic mystery. It shone in his soul as it once shone in the first Christian Christmas, when those beings who did not descend to the physical plane proclaimed the connection between a cosmic and an earthly power and between what can happen in the human heart and in the cosmos when the human heart unites with the Christ being. For today it is no longer necessary to proclaim what the Egyptians said: The God with whom you must unite lives in that world which can only be reached by passing through death. Now the God with whom man must unite lives among us between birth and death, and people can find him if they unite their souls and hearts with him here. That is why the Christmas message resounds in the first Christian Christmas:

Revelation through the heights to God,
Peace and quiet
through peace on earth,
Blessing
in mankind!

[ 41 ] Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) then recited Novalis' “Marienlieder” (Songs of Mary).