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274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 31, 1923 31 Dec 1923, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
I will just note today that the Paradeis play was usually performed in the way I have described to you, during the Advent season, the Christ-Birth play in the actual Christmas season and this Epiphany play around the time of the Epiphany, on January 6, around this day. One can clearly perceive how the style of the two plays, the Christmas play and also the Paradeis play and this Epiphany play, differ from one another. In the Christmas play, one sees quite clearly that one is dealing with something that comes directly from the folk mind.
It was a kind of communal life that sought religious edification in the shared feelings of those who came together in such a brotherhood. It was in these circles that plays such as this Christmas play, the Christ-Birth-Play, came into being. On the other hand, the play that we will see today was combined with the Christmas play only through an incomprehensible misunderstanding on the part of my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer, I believe, and the two plays are not at all compatible in terms of style.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 31, 1923 31 Dec 1923, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

I will just note today that the Paradeis play was usually performed in the way I have described to you, during the Advent season, the Christ-Birth play in the actual Christmas season and this Epiphany play around the time of the Epiphany, on January 6, around this day. One can clearly perceive how the style of the two plays, the Christmas play and also the Paradeis play and this Epiphany play, differ from one another. In the Christmas play, one sees quite clearly that one is dealing with something that comes directly from the folk mind.

It was a kind of communal life that sought religious edification in the shared feelings of those who came together in such a brotherhood. It was in these circles that plays such as this Christmas play, the Christ-Birth-Play, came into being. On the other hand, the play that we will see today was combined with the Christmas play only through an incomprehensible misunderstanding on the part of my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer, I believe, and the two plays are not at all compatible in terms of style.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 31, 1923 31 Dec 1923, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Steiner Online Library during the Christmas Conference We will now take the liberty of presenting the Epiphany or Herod play to you. In the past few days, we have presented the Paradise Play and the Nativity Play to you, and today we bring you the Epiphany Play. I have already spoken about the history, that is, the origin of the plays, as well as how they are rehearsed. I will just note today that the Paradeis play was usually performed in the way I have described to you, during the Advent season, the Christ-Birth play in the actual Christmas season and this Epiphany play around the time of the Epiphany, on January 6, around this day. One can clearly perceive how the style of the two plays, the Christmas play and also the Paradeis play and this Epiphany play, differ from one another. In the Christmas play, one sees quite clearly that one is dealing with something that comes directly from the folk mind. One must imagine something like the following. There were, especially before the Reformation in Central Europe, but after the Reformation in the various German colonies, one of which is the one in Oberufer, where these plays originated, the Moravian Church, which had a Christian community life as its mission and wanted to keep alive the religious sentiment present in the Gospel of Luke. And such brotherhoods were very widespread. It was a kind of communal life that sought religious edification in the shared feelings of those who came together in such a brotherhood. It was in these circles that plays such as this Christmas play, the Christ-Birth-Play, came into being. On the other hand, the play that we will see today was combined with the Christmas play only through an incomprehensible misunderstanding on the part of my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer, I believe, and the two plays are not at all compatible in terms of style. This Epiphany play emerged from the clergy, which set itself the task of giving something to the people. You can see it everywhere in the play that it comes from the inspiration of the clergy, albeit from clergymen who have been intimately involved with folklore, who have completely immersed themselves in folklore, and who wanted to represent the interests of the church through such plays in folklore. Therefore, a certain primitive nature can be seen in the Christmas play, genuine piety combined with rural coarseness in honor of a religious folk style. By contrast, in this play, which comes before our souls today, we find solemnity. Solemnity that arises from the interest of the church. This Epiphany play has a thoroughly suggestive power, both in terms of the composition, which is extraordinarily dramatic, and in terms of the individual elements that we notice in it. The Paradeis play and the Christ-Birth play were always on my mind during my conversations with Karl Julius Schröer at the end of the 1880s. He had seen the plays performed by the farmers himself, knew how to tell the story in an extraordinarily vivid way, and even then I was able to develop a clear idea of the ancient folklore contained in these plays. But I myself saw the basis for this Epiphany play during my childhood. In Catholic Christian areas, you could see these groups everywhere from New Year's towards Epiphany, with the three magi, the three kings, forming the center with the star. They went from house to house in the villages and performed the play together; not dramatically. But what you have here with us as choral songs, they sometimes performed with some dramatic things in front of the doors and in the houses they visited when there was space. But you could see that in this wandering of the Magi there was something that came from the church. And so the whole Epiphany play actually came from the church, and that is why it has its special suggestive power in the individual parts. It is therefore quite incorrect to lump these two plays with their completely different styles together and to perform them as if they belonged together, one after the other. This can only have happened because these plays had perhaps been combined before, and Karl Julius Schröer found them combined in Malatitsch's work. But anyone who can follow the whole development of the plays knows that these two things do not belong together at all, but even have completely different origins. But again, when you look at the whole complex of this Christmas play, you can see the great value placed on it by the Moravian Brethren community, which had moved from what is now Czechoslovakia to the east - they were, after all, the most excellent most ardent supporters of the Christmas play. You can see what is meant by the whole complex, on the one hand, in the folk tradition of honest, genuine piety; procuration, I would say, of the church from the other side with the Epiphany play. In this way, people have sought to pave the way to people's hearts; they have also found it. And it is true that one comes into quite interesting areas of religious life when one considers the diverse religious life before the Reformation. Of course, what was perhaps already influenced by the Reformation was added later, but historically one should at least recall how an honest, inward mood prevailed at the time when the Reformation was opposed. The clergy had to take such measures to win the people's hearts. Some of what is presented in the story today is based on misunderstanding. For example, it is extremely interesting to get to know Bible translations, if not of the whole Bible, then of large parts of the Old or New Testament in those older, pre-Lutheran times. The language is much more original, much more heartfelt than the language that was supposedly created for the Bible by Luther. And it is actually just an historical legend when it is repeatedly told that Luther first translated the Bible into German. It is not even the case that he practiced the best art of translation, but rather that what existed earlier is actually better. And from the same mood that gave rise to such Bible translations in religious communities in the pre-Reformation period, such plays also emerged. So we are vividly transported into a piece of ancient folk culture through these plays. We have to do this with modern means, but we try to perform them in the way they were performed back then. I have said before: certain things we cannot repeat. Perhaps an attempt could be made to send the devil around with the cow horn in Arlesheim and Dornach. He would have to blow into each window to make it clear to the people – that is the custom – that they should come to the Christmas play today! But I don't know whether that would make us more popular or even less popular. There are some other things we can't imitate either. For example, these plays were only performed by boys. It wouldn't work for us to have them performed only by boys either. Then we can't repeat this in particular, that penalties have to be paid if someone doesn't remember something the teacher had rehearsed in the right way. Yes, there would be a revolution among the players. Then we also cannot introduce the fact that we would take two rappen as an entrance fee, or four rappen were given and taken as an entrance fee at that time. Children paid half. We cannot imitate that either. I don't know, but it is reported that defective clothes and so on were repaired for the next performance from the money received in this way. Well, the audience was usually not as large as this one. So we also see into times when things were even cheaper. But apart from all this, we would like to try to present a real piece of old folklore to your soul with this play, this Epiphany or Herod play, even though we can only do so by transposing it into modern circumstances, so to speak, but shaping these modern circumstances in such a way that the old style is preserved. And so we would like to present this Epiphany play to you in particular.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 31, 1923 31 Dec 1923, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

Translated by Steiner Online Library

during the Christmas Conference

We will now take the liberty of presenting the Epiphany or Herod play to you. In the past few days, we have presented the Paradise Play and the Nativity Play to you, and today we bring you the Epiphany Play. I have already spoken about the history, that is, the origin of the plays, as well as how they are rehearsed. I will just note today that the Paradeis play was usually performed in the way I have described to you, during the Advent season, the Christ-Birth play in the actual Christmas season and this Epiphany play around the time of the Epiphany, on January 6, around this day. One can clearly perceive how the style of the two plays, the Christmas play and also the Paradeis play and this Epiphany play, differ from one another. In the Christmas play, one sees quite clearly that one is dealing with something that comes directly from the folk mind. One must imagine something like the following.

There were, especially before the Reformation in Central Europe, but after the Reformation in the various German colonies, one of which is the one in Oberufer, where these plays originated, the Moravian Church, which had a Christian community life as its mission and wanted to keep alive the religious sentiment present in the Gospel of Luke. And such brotherhoods were very widespread. It was a kind of communal life that sought religious edification in the shared feelings of those who came together in such a brotherhood. It was in these circles that plays such as this Christmas play, the Christ-Birth-Play, came into being. On the other hand, the play that we will see today was combined with the Christmas play only through an incomprehensible misunderstanding on the part of my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer, I believe, and the two plays are not at all compatible in terms of style. This Epiphany play emerged from the clergy, which set itself the task of giving something to the people. You can see it everywhere in the play that it comes from the inspiration of the clergy, albeit from clergymen who have been intimately involved with folklore, who have completely immersed themselves in folklore, and who wanted to represent the interests of the church through such plays in folklore.

Therefore, a certain primitive nature can be seen in the Christmas play, genuine piety combined with rural coarseness in honor of a religious folk style. By contrast, in this play, which comes before our souls today, we find solemnity. Solemnity that arises from the interest of the church. This Epiphany play has a thoroughly suggestive power, both in terms of the composition, which is extraordinarily dramatic, and in terms of the individual elements that we notice in it.

The Paradeis play and the Christ-Birth play were always on my mind during my conversations with Karl Julius Schröer at the end of the 1880s. He had seen the plays performed by the farmers himself, knew how to tell the story in an extraordinarily vivid way, and even then I was able to develop a clear idea of the ancient folklore contained in these plays. But I myself saw the basis for this Epiphany play during my childhood. In Catholic Christian areas, you could see these groups everywhere from New Year's towards Epiphany, with the three magi, the three kings, forming the center with the star. They went from house to house in the villages and performed the play together; not dramatically. But what you have here with us as choral songs, they sometimes performed with some dramatic things in front of the doors and in the houses they visited when there was space. But you could see that in this wandering of the Magi there was something that came from the church. And so the whole Epiphany play actually came from the church, and that is why it has its special suggestive power in the individual parts. It is therefore quite incorrect to lump these two plays with their completely different styles together and to perform them as if they belonged together, one after the other. This can only have happened because these plays had perhaps been combined before, and Karl Julius Schröer found them combined in Malatitsch's work. But anyone who can follow the whole development of the plays knows that these two things do not belong together at all, but even have completely different origins.

But again, when you look at the whole complex of this Christmas play, you can see the great value placed on it by the Moravian Brethren community, which had moved from what is now Czechoslovakia to the east - they were, after all, the most excellent most ardent supporters of the Christmas play. You can see what is meant by the whole complex, on the one hand, in the folk tradition of honest, genuine piety; procuration, I would say, of the church from the other side with the Epiphany play. In this way, people have sought to pave the way to people's hearts; they have also found it. And it is true that one comes into quite interesting areas of religious life when one considers the diverse religious life before the Reformation. Of course, what was perhaps already influenced by the Reformation was added later, but historically one should at least recall how an honest, inward mood prevailed at the time when the Reformation was opposed. The clergy had to take such measures to win the people's hearts.

Some of what is presented in the story today is based on misunderstanding. For example, it is extremely interesting to get to know Bible translations, if not of the whole Bible, then of large parts of the Old or New Testament in those older, pre-Lutheran times. The language is much more original, much more heartfelt than the language that was supposedly created for the Bible by Luther. And it is actually just an historical legend when it is repeatedly told that Luther first translated the Bible into German. It is not even the case that he practiced the best art of translation, but rather that what existed earlier is actually better. And from the same mood that gave rise to such Bible translations in religious communities in the pre-Reformation period, such plays also emerged. So we are vividly transported into a piece of ancient folk culture through these plays.

We have to do this with modern means, but we try to perform them in the way they were performed back then. I have said before: certain things we cannot repeat. Perhaps an attempt could be made to send the devil around with the cow horn in Arlesheim and Dornach. He would have to blow into each window to make it clear to the people – that is the custom – that they should come to the Christmas play today! But I don't know whether that would make us more popular or even less popular.

There are some other things we can't imitate either. For example, these plays were only performed by boys. It wouldn't work for us to have them performed only by boys either. Then we can't repeat this in particular, that penalties have to be paid if someone doesn't remember something the teacher had rehearsed in the right way. Yes, there would be a revolution among the players. Then we also cannot introduce the fact that we would take two rappen as an entrance fee, or four rappen were given and taken as an entrance fee at that time. Children paid half. We cannot imitate that either. I don't know, but it is reported that defective clothes and so on were repaired for the next performance from the money received in this way. Well, the audience was usually not as large as this one. So we also see into times when things were even cheaper.

But apart from all this, we would like to try to present a real piece of old folklore to your soul with this play, this Epiphany or Herod play, even though we can only do so by transposing it into modern circumstances, so to speak, but shaping these modern circumstances in such a way that the old style is preserved. And so we would like to present this Epiphany play to you in particular.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 19, 1920 19 Dec 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
In these Christmas plays, we therefore have germs that have gradually developed from a longer cultural tradition that we can trace back to the 13th century.
One of the Christmas plays is a “Paradeis” play, which was more closely associated with the Advent season; the other is a direct Christian shepherd play, which we are presenting here before you. As you will see from the introduction to the second play, it was performed throughout the Rhine region, and these plays were also performed on the road. Nevertheless, as Schröer found them, they came, as I said, to the Oberufer, to the Pressburg area – as they are also called Oberufer Christmas plays – for performance, east of Pressburg.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 19, 1920 19 Dec 1920, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

In these Christmas plays, we therefore have germs that have gradually developed from a longer cultural tradition that we can trace back to the 13th century.

One of the Christmas plays is a “Paradeis” play, which was more closely associated with the Advent season; the other is a direct Christian shepherd play, which we are presenting here before you. As you will see from the introduction to the second play, it was performed throughout the Rhine region, and these plays were also performed on the road. Nevertheless, as Schröer found them, they came, as I said, to the Oberufer, to the Pressburg area – as they are also called Oberufer Christmas plays – for performance, east of Pressburg.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 19, 1920 19 Dec 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Steiner Online Library We will take the liberty of showing you Christmas plays from ancient folklore today. The two plays that we are presenting here were found by Karl Julius Schröer in the 1850s in the German-speaking enclaves in Hungary, in the area north of the Danube and west of Bratislava. Germans immigrated to these areas at the end of the Middle Ages and even a little later. Among other cultural possessions that they owned in their simplicity, they also brought these Christmas plays with them to their new homes. Karl Julius Schröer, with whom I talked a lot about these things in my youth, who was able to tell me from his personal experiences how, in turn, in his youth - in the forties and fifties of the last century - among these, I would say Slavic and Magyar populations, these Christmas plays were always performed by the devious Germans living there, and they really had an extraordinarily serious effect on the minds of these people around Christmas time, with great zeal. In these Christmas plays, we therefore have germs that have gradually developed from a longer cultural tradition that we can trace back to the 13th century. So that until the last decades of the 12th century, the need arose to present to the people, in a dramatic way, what refers to the biblical story, what refers to the Christian traditions, namely also to the Christian legend, throughout the widest areas of Central Europe – through Thuringia to the Rhine and across the Rhine to Alsace, then through all of southern Germany, through northern Switzerland. It can be said that much of modern drama is based on these mystery plays – that is what they are called, after all. Initially, these plays were linked to church services. When Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi and many other holy festivals approached, people gathered in the church. The church itself was decorated in the most diverse ways. And in the 12th and 13th centuries, the clergy themselves performed, initially in Latin, what was contained within the Christian tradition, within the Gospel story. So we can easily trace back how, for example, the scene at Christ's tomb was dramatically depicted. Three priests dressed as women: the three women who came to the tomb; an angel sitting on the tomb that had just been left. What the Gospels tell us, what tradition has preserved, was dramatically depicted. But people also gradually began to present the things that were initially presented in Latin in the vernacular. And in the 14th century we already see very elaborate dramatic presentations, for example of the story of the wise and foolish virgins. We know that in 1322 in Thuringia, at the foot of the Wartburg, in Eisenach, in the house “die Rolle”, a play about the wise and foolish virgins was performed that was so significant in the fate of a person that the landgrave Frederick, who was present, who has the remarkable epithet, “with the bitten cheek,” that the landgrave Frederick with the bitten cheek had a stroke from it and even died in 1323 as a result of this impression. But not everyone felt the same way; rather, it was precisely what was presented by such performances that was extraordinarily solemn in those times. For a long time, the dramatic representation that was given in Eisenach and made such a great impression was lost. The play was later rediscovered, curiously in Mulhouse in Alsace, at Tegernsee and in a monastery in Benediktbeuern, so that one can see, precisely from this appearance at Tegernsee, that these things actually moved from the south to the north. We then very soon find that it is no longer only clergy who present these things, but that these things have been taken up by the people and become very dear to the people. The people were extremely fond of them. We see what has been carried out. We can still see this in one piece of writing that has been preserved. We learn from this writing that in the 15th century the entire story of Christ Jesus on earth was performed: from the wedding at Cana in Galilee to the resurrection. And everywhere we see that the most effective moments, the moments that were most effective for the external view, were emphasized in an extraordinarily dramatic and spiritual way, always the things that the people themselves experienced in these performances. And we may assume that in the 15th century, at the end of the 16th century and for a large part of the German-speaking areas, these folk plays were performed at Christmas time, at Easter time, at Whitsun, on Corpus Christi and at other festivals. One of the Christmas plays is a “Paradeis” play, which was more closely associated with the Advent season; the other is a direct Christian shepherd play, which we are presenting here before you. As you will see from the introduction to the second play, it was performed throughout the Rhine region, and these plays were also performed on the road. Nevertheless, as Schröer found them, they came, as I said, to the Oberufer, to the Pressburg area – as they are also called Oberufer Christmas plays – for performance, east of Pressburg. So they were performed there during the Christmas season, even though they originated quite elsewhere. Originally they were performed where the Rhine flows through. They were taken along by a community that had migrated eastwards and settled east of the Danube in Banat and so on. There these plays were continued until well into the 19th century. In recent times, many such treasures of the people were lost due to the events of the time, which became quite different. But those who still saw the plays were deeply moved, not only by the play itself, but especially by the way in which these plays were introduced. When the grape harvest was over, in the fall, the clergyman and a few others, the local teacher, gathered the young men they thought capable of staging such a Christmas play. For many weeks, the exercises, the preliminary exercises, were practiced. And from the way in which people had to prepare for the solemnity of these plays, one can see the spirit in which such things were undertaken. There lived, I might say, an inwardly cozy Christianity, an inwardly cozy Christianity. One sees it in the whole way of introducing such plays. There were definite rules according to which these plays were prepared for many weeks. The clergyman or the teacher gathered the boys together. As a rule, the female roles were also performed by boys; we cannot imitate that here. Our female members would protest too much against that, but in the Oberufer area, where Karl Julius Schröer discovered these things, it was definitely boys who also performed the female roles. These youths were given strict rules. Rules were made that are now, as we have been trying to revive these plays within our circles for years, for those of our honored listeners who wish to attend. These rules no longer have the same significance for our performers, but they show us how seriously these things were taken. For example, one of the rules was that those who were to participate in the play had to lead honorable lives for the many weeks, especially evening after evening for all those weeks, while they were going through these rehearsals. Well, it goes without saying that our people always lead honorable lives! So this rule has no further significance for us. Furthermore, no mischief was allowed. That should not be the rule among anthroposophists. However, there was also a regulation, a kind of punishment, which we are not introducing here simply because there would be too much protest against it, and if it were necessary to demand it, it would not be adhered to. It was a strict rule that for every memory lapse that occurred during the dress rehearsal and especially during the performances themselves, strict penalties had to be paid by the fellow player! As I said, we cannot introduce that. Because these penalties would never be paid by us. But now there was one very strict regulation, ladies and gentlemen, that we cannot introduce at all. This strict regulation was that during the rehearsals, the rehearsers had to be strictly obedient to the clergyman or teacher, that is, to everyone who had to be a teacher. Well, you will understand that we can never introduce that among ourselves, of course. But you can see from these strict paragraphs how extraordinarily seriously this matter was taken. And it is this seriousness that strikes you when you delve into the whole way in which these plays were performed. Not sentimentally, often interspersed with a delightful sense of humor, these things were originally given by the clergy out of their sense of the people, but the people took hold of them and absorbed them completely in their spirit. So that, as they are presented here, they are thoroughly folksy and take us back to the feelings, the perceptions, the thoughts of a part of Christian society in the 16th century, perhaps still in the 15th century. All this comes to mind when we look at these plays. We may imagine that over a large part of Central Europe, over the areas I mentioned earlier, from the 14th century into the following centuries – in some areas, as you can see, this only gradually disappeared in the 19th century – at all so-called holy times these plays, that is, the Christmas play, the Easter play, the Whitsun play, were performed. And the way in which these people have brought Christianity to life within them, how they present the Gospels to us in an extraordinarily vivid and popular way, shows that they have made a deep impact on the people. And we also consider it our task to draw attention to how the spiritual life has been preserved through the centuries, and how a part of the spiritual life of Central Europe has been preserved. Those who have seen how this spiritual life of Central Europe, insofar as it was folk life, gradually died out in the second half of the 19th century, will be able to feel a lot through this resurrection of old folk times. It is in this spirit, ladies and gentlemen, that we would like to present the Paradeis play to you today, followed by the Christ-Birth play.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 19, 1920 19 Dec 1920, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

Translated by Steiner Online Library

We will take the liberty of showing you Christmas plays from ancient folklore today. The two plays that we are presenting here were found by Karl Julius Schröer in the 1850s in the German-speaking enclaves in Hungary, in the area north of the Danube and west of Bratislava. Germans immigrated to these areas at the end of the Middle Ages and even a little later. Among other cultural possessions that they owned in their simplicity, they also brought these Christmas plays with them to their new homes.

Karl Julius Schröer, with whom I talked a lot about these things in my youth, who was able to tell me from his personal experiences how, in turn, in his youth - in the forties and fifties of the last century - among these, I would say Slavic and Magyar populations, these Christmas plays were always performed by the devious Germans living there, and they really had an extraordinarily serious effect on the minds of these people around Christmas time, with great zeal.

In these Christmas plays, we therefore have germs that have gradually developed from a longer cultural tradition that we can trace back to the 13th century. So that until the last decades of the 12th century, the need arose to present to the people, in a dramatic way, what refers to the biblical story, what refers to the Christian traditions, namely also to the Christian legend, throughout the widest areas of Central Europe – through Thuringia to the Rhine and across the Rhine to Alsace, then through all of southern Germany, through northern Switzerland.

It can be said that much of modern drama is based on these mystery plays – that is what they are called, after all.

Initially, these plays were linked to church services. When Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi and many other holy festivals approached, people gathered in the church. The church itself was decorated in the most diverse ways. And in the 12th and 13th centuries, the clergy themselves performed, initially in Latin, what was contained within the Christian tradition, within the Gospel story.

So we can easily trace back how, for example, the scene at Christ's tomb was dramatically depicted. Three priests dressed as women: the three women who came to the tomb; an angel sitting on the tomb that had just been left. What the Gospels tell us, what tradition has preserved, was dramatically depicted.

But people also gradually began to present the things that were initially presented in Latin in the vernacular. And in the 14th century we already see very elaborate dramatic presentations, for example of the story of the wise and foolish virgins.

We know that in 1322 in Thuringia, at the foot of the Wartburg, in Eisenach, in the house “die Rolle”, a play about the wise and foolish virgins was performed that was so significant in the fate of a person that the landgrave Frederick, who was present, who has the remarkable epithet, “with the bitten cheek,” that the landgrave Frederick with the bitten cheek had a stroke from it and even died in 1323 as a result of this impression.

But not everyone felt the same way; rather, it was precisely what was presented by such performances that was extraordinarily solemn in those times. For a long time, the dramatic representation that was given in Eisenach and made such a great impression was lost. The play was later rediscovered, curiously in Mulhouse in Alsace, at Tegernsee and in a monastery in Benediktbeuern, so that one can see, precisely from this appearance at Tegernsee, that these things actually moved from the south to the north.

We then very soon find that it is no longer only clergy who present these things, but that these things have been taken up by the people and become very dear to the people. The people were extremely fond of them. We see what has been carried out. We can still see this in one piece of writing that has been preserved. We learn from this writing that in the 15th century the entire story of Christ Jesus on earth was performed: from the wedding at Cana in Galilee to the resurrection. And everywhere we see that the most effective moments, the moments that were most effective for the external view, were emphasized in an extraordinarily dramatic and spiritual way, always the things that the people themselves experienced in these performances. And we may assume that in the 15th century, at the end of the 16th century and for a large part of the German-speaking areas, these folk plays were performed at Christmas time, at Easter time, at Whitsun, on Corpus Christi and at other festivals.

One of the Christmas plays is a “Paradeis” play, which was more closely associated with the Advent season; the other is a direct Christian shepherd play, which we are presenting here before you. As you will see from the introduction to the second play, it was performed throughout the Rhine region, and these plays were also performed on the road. Nevertheless, as Schröer found them, they came, as I said, to the Oberufer, to the Pressburg area – as they are also called Oberufer Christmas plays – for performance, east of Pressburg. So they were performed there during the Christmas season, even though they originated quite elsewhere. Originally they were performed where the Rhine flows through. They were taken along by a community that had migrated eastwards and settled east of the Danube in Banat and so on. There these plays were continued until well into the 19th century. In recent times, many such treasures of the people were lost due to the events of the time, which became quite different. But those who still saw the plays were deeply moved, not only by the play itself, but especially by the way in which these plays were introduced.

When the grape harvest was over, in the fall, the clergyman and a few others, the local teacher, gathered the young men they thought capable of staging such a Christmas play. For many weeks, the exercises, the preliminary exercises, were practiced. And from the way in which people had to prepare for the solemnity of these plays, one can see the spirit in which such things were undertaken. There lived, I might say, an inwardly cozy Christianity, an inwardly cozy Christianity. One sees it in the whole way of introducing such plays. There were definite rules according to which these plays were prepared for many weeks. The clergyman or the teacher gathered the boys together. As a rule, the female roles were also performed by boys; we cannot imitate that here. Our female members would protest too much against that, but in the Oberufer area, where Karl Julius Schröer discovered these things, it was definitely boys who also performed the female roles. These youths were given strict rules. Rules were made that are now, as we have been trying to revive these plays within our circles for years, for those of our honored listeners who wish to attend. These rules no longer have the same significance for our performers, but they show us how seriously these things were taken. For example, one of the rules was that those who were to participate in the play had to lead honorable lives for the many weeks, especially evening after evening for all those weeks, while they were going through these rehearsals. Well, it goes without saying that our people always lead honorable lives! So this rule has no further significance for us. Furthermore, no mischief was allowed. That should not be the rule among anthroposophists. However, there was also a regulation, a kind of punishment, which we are not introducing here simply because there would be too much protest against it, and if it were necessary to demand it, it would not be adhered to. It was a strict rule that for every memory lapse that occurred during the dress rehearsal and especially during the performances themselves, strict penalties had to be paid by the fellow player! As I said, we cannot introduce that. Because these penalties would never be paid by us.

But now there was one very strict regulation, ladies and gentlemen, that we cannot introduce at all. This strict regulation was that during the rehearsals, the rehearsers had to be strictly obedient to the clergyman or teacher, that is, to everyone who had to be a teacher. Well, you will understand that we can never introduce that among ourselves, of course. But you can see from these strict paragraphs how extraordinarily seriously this matter was taken. And it is this seriousness that strikes you when you delve into the whole way in which these plays were performed. Not sentimentally, often interspersed with a delightful sense of humor, these things were originally given by the clergy out of their sense of the people, but the people took hold of them and absorbed them completely in their spirit. So that, as they are presented here, they are thoroughly folksy and take us back to the feelings, the perceptions, the thoughts of a part of Christian society in the 16th century, perhaps still in the 15th century. All this comes to mind when we look at these plays.

We may imagine that over a large part of Central Europe, over the areas I mentioned earlier, from the 14th century into the following centuries – in some areas, as you can see, this only gradually disappeared in the 19th century – at all so-called holy times these plays, that is, the Christmas play, the Easter play, the Whitsun play, were performed. And the way in which these people have brought Christianity to life within them, how they present the Gospels to us in an extraordinarily vivid and popular way, shows that they have made a deep impact on the people. And we also consider it our task to draw attention to how the spiritual life has been preserved through the centuries, and how a part of the spiritual life of Central Europe has been preserved. Those who have seen how this spiritual life of Central Europe, insofar as it was folk life, gradually died out in the second half of the 19th century, will be able to feel a lot through this resurrection of old folk times. It is in this spirit, ladies and gentlemen, that we would like to present the Paradeis play to you today, followed by the Christ-Birth play.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 30, 1917 30 Dec 1917, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
You can see many such plays everywhere. But the two plays we will be talking about today, and some others, differ from other Christmas plays in quite a significant way.
First of all – the performances were staged between three and five o'clock – the Shepherds' Christmas Play was usually performed, which we present here as the second play. It depicted the proclamation of Christ Jesus by the angel, the birth of Christ Jesus, that is, everything that our second play, the Shepherds' Play, will present.
But as I said, with the old Oberufer play, this is definitely not to be taken in the same way as with the other Christmas plays. The Christmas plays, Easter plays, Passion plays and so on go back to ancient performances, which all actually originated from church celebrations.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 30, 1917 30 Dec 1917, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Steiner Online Library on the occasion of the performance of old German Christmas plays for German prisoners of war interned in Switzerland. On behalf of all friends of our anthroposophical movement and especially those who are united here at this building, I have the deepest satisfaction today to greet you most warmly. You will believe in the sincere warmth of this greeting. After all, the feelings we have for you are imbued with everything we are experiencing as a result of those painful events of the present, which are having such a profound impact not only on the general fate of the world, but also on the fate of each individual, especially those whose visit we are meant to be here today. What we would like to offer you are Christmas plays. These performances should be taken without pretension; we ask you to bear this in mind. They are an attempt to revive old memories of European culture. And perhaps I can most easily explain what these plays are about if I take the liberty of drawing your attention to how I myself first became acquainted with them. The content of these plays is not directly related to our anthroposophical movement, but this is only apparent. Only someone who misunderstands anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can believe that such tasks as those associated with these Christmas plays are not within its scope. After all, the interest in everything that concerns the spiritual life and the development of humanity must be within its scope. I myself was introduced to these plays decades ago, and specifically to the plays that are to be rehearsed here today, through my old friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer discovered precisely these plays, which are old, which have been performed somewhere, there or there, in earlier times and which are now being renewed. You can see many such plays everywhere. But the two plays we will be talking about today, and some others, differ from other Christmas plays in quite a significant way. Karl Julius Schröer found them on the island of Oberufer in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. This is an island off the island of Schütt, which is formed by the Danube below Pressburg, where Hungary borders Austria. Since the 16th or at least since the beginning of the 17th century, these Christmas plays have been preserved among the German farmers, the so-called Haidbauern, all in personal tradition. They have been passed down from generation to generation. The Haidbauer, from whom Karl Julius Schröer took them over, had actually only copied the individual roles. A complete manuscript of these things was hardly found. They were performed every year by the Oberufer farmers, whenever they could, when the people among the farmers of Upper Hungary had the time. Let us first take a brief look at how it was done. I would like to describe it in the following way. When the autumn work, the harvest work, was done, one of the most respected farmers in the area, who had inherited these plays and the right to perform them from his ancestors, would gather a group of young men and rehearse with them from October, November to December, right through to Advent. The sentiment associated with the performance of these plays is actually what is most touching about the matter. It was truly, by going to the performance of these plays revealing the biblical mysteries, that the whole thing was associated with a deep moral consciousness. This is already evident from the conditions imposed on those who wanted to play in them. The farmer who was in charge of the plays in the 1850s communicated these conditions to Karl Julius Schröer in the following way. He said: “Those boys who were allowed to perform, who were to play a role in the plays, had to fulfill the following conditions for the entire period of preparation until the festival: first, they were not allowed to visit any of the girls during that time; second, they were not allowed to sing any rogue songs; and thirdly, they had to lead an honorable life throughout the weeks, which was obviously a very difficult fact for some; fourthly, they had to follow the master unreservedly in all things related to the preparations for the plays, who rehearsed them with them. That was just one of the most respected farmers. These plays were performed in front of Catholics and Protestants mixed together, and the performers themselves were too. The plays had a religious character, but not the slightest confessional character. And hostility from any side towards what was to be presented in these plays was actually only on the part of the “intellectuals” in Oberufer. Even back then, the intelligentsia was opposed to such folksy Christmas plays, to such performances inspired by that ethos. Fortunately for us, the intelligentsia at that time consisted of a single schoolmaster who was also the mayor and notary. He was a single personality, but he was dead set against the plays. And the farmers had to perform them in defiance of the local authorities. Only boys were allowed to participate in the performances as actors. For obvious reasons, we have to refrain from this practice; in fact, we cannot imitate some of the refinements associated with those performances, although we try to give an idea of what the farmers were able to offer back then through our own performances. The boys also had to play the female roles. Eva, Maria and so on were performed by boys. After weeks of rehearsals, the whole procession of players set off. In front walked someone carrying a so-called Kranawittbaum, a juniper tree used as a symbol of paradise or a Christmas tree. Behind him came the star-bearer, who carried the star on a pole or on a so-called “scissors”. You will see it later: the scissors are designed so that the star can be made closer or further away by rolling up the star scissors. And so the procession moved towards the inn where the performance was to take place. The clothing of those people who performed a part, except for the devil and the angel, was only put on in the inn itself. While the people were dressing, the devil, whom you will also get to know, ran around the village, making mischief with a cow horn, drawing attention to himself, speaking to people. In short, he made sure that as many people as possible appeared in the inn where the performance was to take place. The performance itself was such that the audience sat in a kind of horseshoe shape, with the stage in the middle of this horseshoe, which of course we cannot imitate either. You will see that it is essentially biblical memories that were performed. First of all – the performances were staged between three and five o'clock – the Shepherds' Christmas Play was usually performed, which we present here as the second play. It depicted the proclamation of Christ Jesus by the angel, the birth of Christ Jesus, that is, everything that our second play, the Shepherds' Play, will present. Then came the Fall of Man, which depicts the Fall of Man in Paradise – our first play to be performed today – followed, as a rule, by a carnival play. Just as in ancient Greek tragedy a satyr play always followed the drama, so here a carnival play, a comic epilogue, followed. It is noteworthy that the characters who represented sacred individuals – Mary, Joseph and so on, who appeared in the first plays – were not allowed to appear in the carnival play; a certain religious sentiment was associated with these plays. Some of the details are very interesting to follow. If you watch the Shepherds' Play – the second to be performed – today, you will see three innkeepers, at whom the wandering Joseph, who is portrayed as an old man in all these plays, seeks shelter for himself and Mary. They are rejected by the first two innkeepers and led to the stable by the third. This was originally different, but it is still portrayed as such in Oberufer: originally there was an innkeeper, a landlady and her maid. And the idea was linked to that: the innkeeper rejects Joseph and Mary, as does the landlady, only the maid offers them shelter in the stable. Because it probably became difficult to find the necessary young people to play the innkeeper and her maid during the performances, the roles were then transferred to two other innkeepers, so that we now have three innkeepers. But as I said, with the old Oberufer play, this is definitely not to be taken in the same way as with the other Christmas plays. The Christmas plays, Easter plays, Passion plays and so on go back to ancient performances, which all actually originated from church celebrations. In the churches, the clergy originally performed all kinds of things related to the Holy History after the Christmas celebrations, Easter celebrations and so on. Then, in particular due to the fact that the audience grew larger and larger and that the stories were translated from Latin into the vernacular, the plays gradually moved from the ecclesiastical to the secular and were performed outside of the church by farmers. And so we present these plays to you here. They have been preserved in their original form, which they probably took on in the 16th century. They have been preserved because they most likely originated in southern Germany during the early days of German development, namely in the Lake Constance area. When the various tribes that originally came from the Lake Constance area of southern Germany migrated to Austria and Hungary in earlier centuries, they took these plays with them. These plays were also present in the homeland, but in the homeland they were constantly changing. There were numerous people, clergy, scholars, who had influence over these things, and the things were corrupted. They were preserved unadulterated under the care of those who, in the midst of the Slavic and Magyar populations, had to rely on themselves and who, over the centuries, preserved things in their original form. That is why it was a real find for Schröer when he discovered these plays among the Germans of Upper Hungary in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. For those with a more refined sensibility, they are not at all what the Christmas plays that are so frequently performed today, which have changed over the centuries, are. Rather, they are truly something that takes us back to a part of Europe's past in centuries past. Karl Julius Schröer was particularly suited to preserve something like this. He was truly an exemplary man, a remarkable man, and his memory must be preserved with such things; he was deeply imbued with the idea of how such and similar things actually created the cement that culturally held together this state structure of Austria on the land that was created by those colonists who migrated from the Rhine, from southern Germany, from central Germany, migrated to Upper Hungary, migrated from west to east; also to Styria, to the more southern regions of Hungary, migrated as the Zipser Saxons to Transylvania, migrated as Swabians to the Banat, which, I would like to say, tragically gave up the land on which this culture developed. Now, Schröer was completely imbued with this cultural idea when he refreshed the old memories contained in the Christmas plays. He did many other things as well. And when you immersed yourself with him in his cultural studies, which were so devoid of all coloration of chauvinism but which were deeply imbued with the cultural mission associated with them, you first recognized the full value of the life's work of this man, who collected everything that had already been more or less eradicated from these areas by the mid-19th century due to the spreading cultural trends that dominate this area today. He left us his grammar and dictionaries of the German dialects in Hungary and the Spiš region, which he had carefully prepared, and the Heanzen and Gottscheer dialects, which he treated based on the grammar. His life's work, which he dedicated to literary history and Goethe, actually left a wonderful description of everything that brings together the entire German element, which underlies all cultural areas of this Central European state of Austria as the actual cultural cement. And that is what lives on as a special idea in the research of Karl Julius Schröer. So that we do not just have the product of philological or linguistic scholarship before us, but something that has been collected with heart and mind for that which lives as spirit in these things. And that is why it is so satisfying to be able to refresh these things a little. Our friend Leopold van der Pals has tried to refresh the musical element of these things a little, and with his music you will see the performances here. So one can say that what we are offering you here is the product of the real mystery plays, the various Christmas plays, as they were spread throughout Europe in earlier centuries. But they should not be preserved in the form in which, for example, the world has caricatured the so-called Oberammergau Passion Plays. There is nothing left of what was actually intended in those ancient times. However, some things cannot be revived. For example, a special way of reciting the play, which was still practised among the farmers in the old way, even in the 1950s, cannot be revived. With the exception of particularly solemn moments, when God the Father speaks and the like, everything that was presented was presented by the actors in such a way that they spoke in the spirit of their verse. The verse had four uplifts, he appeared, the tone moved by one tone on the fourth uplift. A certain person, let's say: Joseph, whom you will find later, the husband of Mary, for example, spoke the first heave in the pitch C, then E, then F, then went back again on the fourth heave. The other characters spoke in such a way that they began with a C, and then had the pitch E three times, then went back to C again. With great art, but with a simple, restrained art, these things were presented and one really felt the Christmas and Easter mood with transitions into the secular, without sentimentality, without any element of sentimentality. So in these things is contained what people felt and sensed as their spiritual life when they stepped out of the church into the world. Some passages that may be more difficult to understand will also be explained. The whole thing was of course presented in the local dialect, and there are many things in it that may not be immediately understandable. For example, in the Paradise play, God the Father is referred to as “a Reeb.” When it is said: Eve was made from a rib, you must not think that it is a wrong pronunciation here, when it is said that Eve is created by God the Father from a rib of Adam. The farmer really does not say rib, but rib. The devil then reports in the course of the Herod play once, he has a few rats. Ratten is a corruption of Ratten. Then perhaps it is not generally known the word “Kletzen”. Hätten Adam und Eva Kletzen gfress'n, 's wär ihna tausendmal nützer gwes'n. Now, Kletzen is something that was always eaten at Christmas in the area where the plays were performed: it is made from dried plums and pears. This is said so that people have something to latch onto that they already know. Then there is the word frozzeln, which the devil uses. It means to tease, to mock, to make fun of. There are a number of expressions in both plays that may not be immediately understandable. So you will see that one saying in particular is used by the innkeepers: I åls a wirt von meiner gstålt Håb in mein haus and loplaynt gwålt. One might think that the innkeeper thinks he is an innkeeper of a particular stature, shape and has power in his house. But this refers to rank. I, as an innkeeper of my rank, of my standing. He who is so well-positioned, has such prestige, has power in his house, namely the power to attract customers to his inn. So, an innkeeper who knows how to give his house such a reputation as I do, has the power to bring his house into such a reputation that it has many people as guests. That is what is meant by this expression. Clamor means rumor; the farmer uses the word for a rumor that spreads. The angel says: Elizabeth is in the rumor that she is barren. - So it means: the rumor is that she is barren. But the farmer says: rumor, he does not say: the rumor. Then you will hear the word from one of the shepherds: all around. That happens often, it is the custom. I lent him my gloves, as I often do. Then you will often find the word bekern among the shepherd's speeches. This is common in the area where the plays were performed for something that has happened; a story that has been told. When they see each other, they say: they were cold, frozen; or the expression: the ground is as smooth as a mirror. An especially pretty word is the way one shepherd is made aware that it is already late, that the birds are already chirping – in the farming language, that is piewen. Stichl, get up, the forest creatures are squeaking already. In the second line, Gallus says: Stichl, get up, the carters are cracking their whips on the road. Kleschen, that's cracking the whip. The carters are already cracking their whips on the road. These are some of the remarks I wanted to make at the beginning of our performance. Overall, the plays speak for themselves. They are the most beautiful reflection of everything that took place in earlier centuries throughout Central Europe, in such festive plays. For example, there is the St. Gallen manuscript, which consists of 340 verses. There are plays that go back to the 11th century. But I believe that all that exists in this regard cannot quite match the intimacy that lies precisely in the Oberufer plays, which were preserved in the Pressburg area until the 1850s. It is fair to say that these plays are among those things that have unfortunately been lost, that have disappeared and that one would so much like to revive. For they are truly such that through them one remembers what is so intimately connected with the development of our spiritual life. That is what I wanted to say to you before the performance.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 30, 1917 30 Dec 1917, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

Translated by Steiner Online Library

on the occasion of the performance of old German Christmas plays for German prisoners of war interned in Switzerland.

On behalf of all friends of our anthroposophical movement and especially those who are united here at this building, I have the deepest satisfaction today to greet you most warmly. You will believe in the sincere warmth of this greeting. After all, the feelings we have for you are imbued with everything we are experiencing as a result of those painful events of the present, which are having such a profound impact not only on the general fate of the world, but also on the fate of each individual, especially those whose visit we are meant to be here today.

What we would like to offer you are Christmas plays. These performances should be taken without pretension; we ask you to bear this in mind. They are an attempt to revive old memories of European culture. And perhaps I can most easily explain what these plays are about if I take the liberty of drawing your attention to how I myself first became acquainted with them.

The content of these plays is not directly related to our anthroposophical movement, but this is only apparent. Only someone who misunderstands anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can believe that such tasks as those associated with these Christmas plays are not within its scope. After all, the interest in everything that concerns the spiritual life and the development of humanity must be within its scope.

I myself was introduced to these plays decades ago, and specifically to the plays that are to be rehearsed here today, through my old friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer discovered precisely these plays, which are old, which have been performed somewhere, there or there, in earlier times and which are now being renewed. You can see many such plays everywhere. But the two plays we will be talking about today, and some others, differ from other Christmas plays in quite a significant way. Karl Julius Schröer found them on the island of Oberufer in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. This is an island off the island of Schütt, which is formed by the Danube below Pressburg, where Hungary borders Austria. Since the 16th or at least since the beginning of the 17th century, these Christmas plays have been preserved among the German farmers, the so-called Haidbauern, all in personal tradition. They have been passed down from generation to generation. The Haidbauer, from whom Karl Julius Schröer took them over, had actually only copied the individual roles. A complete manuscript of these things was hardly found. They were performed every year by the Oberufer farmers, whenever they could, when the people among the farmers of Upper Hungary had the time.

Let us first take a brief look at how it was done. I would like to describe it in the following way. When the autumn work, the harvest work, was done, one of the most respected farmers in the area, who had inherited these plays and the right to perform them from his ancestors, would gather a group of young men and rehearse with them from October, November to December, right through to Advent. The sentiment associated with the performance of these plays is actually what is most touching about the matter. It was truly, by going to the performance of these plays revealing the biblical mysteries, that the whole thing was associated with a deep moral consciousness. This is already evident from the conditions imposed on those who wanted to play in them. The farmer who was in charge of the plays in the 1850s communicated these conditions to Karl Julius Schröer in the following way. He said: “Those boys who were allowed to perform, who were to play a role in the plays, had to fulfill the following conditions for the entire period of preparation until the festival: first, they were not allowed to visit any of the girls during that time; second, they were not allowed to sing any rogue songs; and thirdly, they had to lead an honorable life throughout the weeks, which was obviously a very difficult fact for some; fourthly, they had to follow the master unreservedly in all things related to the preparations for the plays, who rehearsed them with them. That was just one of the most respected farmers.

These plays were performed in front of Catholics and Protestants mixed together, and the performers themselves were too. The plays had a religious character, but not the slightest confessional character. And hostility from any side towards what was to be presented in these plays was actually only on the part of the “intellectuals” in Oberufer. Even back then, the intelligentsia was opposed to such folksy Christmas plays, to such performances inspired by that ethos. Fortunately for us, the intelligentsia at that time consisted of a single schoolmaster who was also the mayor and notary. He was a single personality, but he was dead set against the plays. And the farmers had to perform them in defiance of the local authorities.

Only boys were allowed to participate in the performances as actors. For obvious reasons, we have to refrain from this practice; in fact, we cannot imitate some of the refinements associated with those performances, although we try to give an idea of what the farmers were able to offer back then through our own performances.

The boys also had to play the female roles. Eva, Maria and so on were performed by boys. After weeks of rehearsals, the whole procession of players set off. In front walked someone carrying a so-called Kranawittbaum, a juniper tree used as a symbol of paradise or a Christmas tree. Behind him came the star-bearer, who carried the star on a pole or on a so-called “scissors”. You will see it later: the scissors are designed so that the star can be made closer or further away by rolling up the star scissors. And so the procession moved towards the inn where the performance was to take place. The clothing of those people who performed a part, except for the devil and the angel, was only put on in the inn itself. While the people were dressing, the devil, whom you will also get to know, ran around the village, making mischief with a cow horn, drawing attention to himself, speaking to people. In short, he made sure that as many people as possible appeared in the inn where the performance was to take place. The performance itself was such that the audience sat in a kind of horseshoe shape, with the stage in the middle of this horseshoe, which of course we cannot imitate either.

You will see that it is essentially biblical memories that were performed. First of all – the performances were staged between three and five o'clock – the Shepherds' Christmas Play was usually performed, which we present here as the second play. It depicted the proclamation of Christ Jesus by the angel, the birth of Christ Jesus, that is, everything that our second play, the Shepherds' Play, will present. Then came the Fall of Man, which depicts the Fall of Man in Paradise – our first play to be performed today – followed, as a rule, by a carnival play. Just as in ancient Greek tragedy a satyr play always followed the drama, so here a carnival play, a comic epilogue, followed. It is noteworthy that the characters who represented sacred individuals – Mary, Joseph and so on, who appeared in the first plays – were not allowed to appear in the carnival play; a certain religious sentiment was associated with these plays.

Some of the details are very interesting to follow. If you watch the Shepherds' Play – the second to be performed – today, you will see three innkeepers, at whom the wandering Joseph, who is portrayed as an old man in all these plays, seeks shelter for himself and Mary. They are rejected by the first two innkeepers and led to the stable by the third. This was originally different, but it is still portrayed as such in Oberufer: originally there was an innkeeper, a landlady and her maid. And the idea was linked to that: the innkeeper rejects Joseph and Mary, as does the landlady, only the maid offers them shelter in the stable. Because it probably became difficult to find the necessary young people to play the innkeeper and her maid during the performances, the roles were then transferred to two other innkeepers, so that we now have three innkeepers. But as I said, with the old Oberufer play, this is definitely not to be taken in the same way as with the other Christmas plays. The Christmas plays, Easter plays, Passion plays and so on go back to ancient performances, which all actually originated from church celebrations. In the churches, the clergy originally performed all kinds of things related to the Holy History after the Christmas celebrations, Easter celebrations and so on. Then, in particular due to the fact that the audience grew larger and larger and that the stories were translated from Latin into the vernacular, the plays gradually moved from the ecclesiastical to the secular and were performed outside of the church by farmers.

And so we present these plays to you here. They have been preserved in their original form, which they probably took on in the 16th century. They have been preserved because they most likely originated in southern Germany during the early days of German development, namely in the Lake Constance area. When the various tribes that originally came from the Lake Constance area of southern Germany migrated to Austria and Hungary in earlier centuries, they took these plays with them. These plays were also present in the homeland, but in the homeland they were constantly changing. There were numerous people, clergy, scholars, who had influence over these things, and the things were corrupted. They were preserved unadulterated under the care of those who, in the midst of the Slavic and Magyar populations, had to rely on themselves and who, over the centuries, preserved things in their original form. That is why it was a real find for Schröer when he discovered these plays among the Germans of Upper Hungary in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. For those with a more refined sensibility, they are not at all what the Christmas plays that are so frequently performed today, which have changed over the centuries, are. Rather, they are truly something that takes us back to a part of Europe's past in centuries past. Karl Julius Schröer was particularly suited to preserve something like this. He was truly an exemplary man, a remarkable man, and his memory must be preserved with such things; he was deeply imbued with the idea of how such and similar things actually created the cement that culturally held together this state structure of Austria on the land that was created by those colonists who migrated from the Rhine, from southern Germany, from central Germany, migrated to Upper Hungary, migrated from west to east; also to Styria, to the more southern regions of Hungary, migrated as the Zipser Saxons to Transylvania, migrated as Swabians to the Banat, which, I would like to say, tragically gave up the land on which this culture developed. Now, Schröer was completely imbued with this cultural idea when he refreshed the old memories contained in the Christmas plays. He did many other things as well. And when you immersed yourself with him in his cultural studies, which were so devoid of all coloration of chauvinism but which were deeply imbued with the cultural mission associated with them, you first recognized the full value of the life's work of this man, who collected everything that had already been more or less eradicated from these areas by the mid-19th century due to the spreading cultural trends that dominate this area today. He left us his grammar and dictionaries of the German dialects in Hungary and the Spiš region, which he had carefully prepared, and the Heanzen and Gottscheer dialects, which he treated based on the grammar. His life's work, which he dedicated to literary history and Goethe, actually left a wonderful description of everything that brings together the entire German element, which underlies all cultural areas of this Central European state of Austria as the actual cultural cement. And that is what lives on as a special idea in the research of Karl Julius Schröer. So that we do not just have the product of philological or linguistic scholarship before us, but something that has been collected with heart and mind for that which lives as spirit in these things. And that is why it is so satisfying to be able to refresh these things a little.

Our friend Leopold van der Pals has tried to refresh the musical element of these things a little, and with his music you will see the performances here. So one can say that what we are offering you here is the product of the real mystery plays, the various Christmas plays, as they were spread throughout Europe in earlier centuries. But they should not be preserved in the form in which, for example, the world has caricatured the so-called Oberammergau Passion Plays. There is nothing left of what was actually intended in those ancient times.

However, some things cannot be revived. For example, a special way of reciting the play, which was still practised among the farmers in the old way, even in the 1950s, cannot be revived. With the exception of particularly solemn moments, when God the Father speaks and the like, everything that was presented was presented by the actors in such a way that they spoke in the spirit of their verse. The verse had four uplifts, he appeared, the tone moved by one tone on the fourth uplift. A certain person, let's say: Joseph, whom you will find later, the husband of Mary, for example, spoke the first heave in the pitch C, then E, then F, then went back again on the fourth heave. The other characters spoke in such a way that they began with a C, and then had the pitch E three times, then went back to C again. With great art, but with a simple, restrained art, these things were presented and one really felt the Christmas and Easter mood with transitions into the secular, without sentimentality, without any element of sentimentality. So in these things is contained what people felt and sensed as their spiritual life when they stepped out of the church into the world.

Some passages that may be more difficult to understand will also be explained. The whole thing was of course presented in the local dialect, and there are many things in it that may not be immediately understandable. For example, in the Paradise play, God the Father is referred to as “a Reeb.”

When it is said: Eve was made from a rib, you must not think that it is a wrong pronunciation here, when it is said that Eve is created by God the Father from a rib of Adam. The farmer really does not say rib, but rib. The devil then reports in the course of the Herod play once, he has a few rats. Ratten is a corruption of Ratten. Then perhaps it is not generally known the word “Kletzen”.

Hätten Adam und Eva Kletzen gfress'n,
's wär ihna tausendmal nützer gwes'n.

Now, Kletzen is something that was always eaten at Christmas in the area where the plays were performed: it is made from dried plums and pears. This is said so that people have something to latch onto that they already know. Then there is the word frozzeln, which the devil uses. It means to tease, to mock, to make fun of. There are a number of expressions in both plays that may not be immediately understandable.

So you will see that one saying in particular is used by the innkeepers:

I åls a wirt von meiner gstålt
Håb in mein haus and loplaynt gwålt.

One might think that the innkeeper thinks he is an innkeeper of a particular stature, shape and has power in his house. But this refers to rank. I, as an innkeeper of my rank, of my standing. He who is so well-positioned, has such prestige, has power in his house, namely the power to attract customers to his inn. So, an innkeeper who knows how to give his house such a reputation as I do, has the power to bring his house into such a reputation that it has many people as guests. That is what is meant by this expression. Clamor means rumor; the farmer uses the word for a rumor that spreads. The angel says: Elizabeth is in the rumor that she is barren. - So it means: the rumor is that she is barren. But the farmer says: rumor, he does not say: the rumor. Then you will hear the word from one of the shepherds: all around. That happens often, it is the custom.

I lent him my gloves, as I often do. Then you will often find the word bekern among the shepherd's speeches. This is common in the area where the plays were performed for something that has happened; a story that has been told. When they see each other, they say: they were cold, frozen; or the expression: the ground is as smooth as a mirror.

An especially pretty word is the way one shepherd is made aware that it is already late, that the birds are already chirping – in the farming language, that is piewen.

Stichl, get up, the forest creatures are squeaking already.

In the second line, Gallus says:

Stichl, get up, the carters are cracking their whips on the road.

Kleschen, that's cracking the whip. The carters are already cracking their whips on the road.

These are some of the remarks I wanted to make at the beginning of our performance. Overall, the plays speak for themselves. They are the most beautiful reflection of everything that took place in earlier centuries throughout Central Europe, in such festive plays. For example, there is the St. Gallen manuscript, which consists of 340 verses. There are plays that go back to the 11th century. But I believe that all that exists in this regard cannot quite match the intimacy that lies precisely in the Oberufer plays, which were preserved in the Pressburg area until the 1850s.

It is fair to say that these plays are among those things that have unfortunately been lost, that have disappeared and that one would so much like to revive. For they are truly such that through them one remembers what is so intimately connected with the development of our spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to say to you before the performance.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 14, 1923 14 Dec 1923, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
And just as the Christian year is marked by everything that permeates consciousness, so at special times the human heart is virtually called upon to permeate these memories with that which in turn are the greatest facts in religious life and in religious consciousness. There are Easter plays, Pentecost plays, Corpus Christi plays, and plays for other holy festivals. The most endearing of these festivals, the ones that most touch the soul, were the Christmas plays. These Christmas plays have been preserved for us particularly from the times when the Middle Ages were coming to an end.
These Germans emigrated and settled in the area around Pressburg, north of the Danube, the so-called Oberufer region, and brought these Christmas plays with them as a precious souvenir of their old home further west. Every year, when Christmas approached, the Christmas plays were rehearsed in the village.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 14, 1923 14 Dec 1923, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

And just as the Christian year is marked by everything that permeates consciousness, so at special times the human heart is virtually called upon to permeate these memories with that which in turn are the greatest facts in religious life and in religious consciousness. There are Easter plays, Pentecost plays, Corpus Christi plays, and plays for other holy festivals. The most endearing of these festivals, the ones that most touch the soul, were the Christmas plays. These Christmas plays have been preserved for us particularly from the times when the Middle Ages were coming to an end.

These Germans emigrated and settled in the area around Pressburg, north of the Danube, the so-called Oberufer region, and brought these Christmas plays with them as a precious souvenir of their old home further west. Every year, when Christmas approached, the Christmas plays were rehearsed in the village.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 14, 1923 14 Dec 1923, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Steiner Online Library Today we would like to present to you two plays from ancient folklore that belong to the series of plays that were often performed during festive seasons in ancient Christian folklore in the Middle Ages and in many regions. We must be clear about the fact that from the 12th or 13th century until the last century, until the middle of the last century, the great festivals of the year - Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and some others - were extraordinarily significant events in the year in Christian areas. And just as the Christian year is marked by everything that permeates consciousness, so at special times the human heart is virtually called upon to permeate these memories with that which in turn are the greatest facts in religious life and in religious consciousness. There are Easter plays, Pentecost plays, Corpus Christi plays, and plays for other holy festivals. The most endearing of these festivals, the ones that most touch the soul, were the Christmas plays. These Christmas plays have been preserved for us particularly from the times when the Middle Ages were coming to an end. And the two plays that we are presenting to you today also come from the late Middle Ages. They were still being performed everywhere in the 16th century, even in the surrounding areas. As is pointed out, they were performed in the areas around here. You can see from this that these plays originally came from a region along the Rhine. But the plays that we are presenting today were not found here in these areas; they were discovered by my old teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer in the middle of the last century in those areas of Upper Hungary that were actually still truly German at the time, but whose German character has long since faded, giving way to Slavic and Magyar elements. German colonies were scattered throughout these areas, as they were throughout Hungary. In the area around Bratislava, north of the Danube, and further over, south of the Carpathians, along the so-called Hungarian highlands to Transylvania; and again down on the lower Danube, in the so-called Banat. In the latter area, the Swabians have settled, who emigrated from Germany; in the areas of northern Hungary, in the areas from which these plays originate, we have Saxon colonists. But those who have cultivated these plays are probably even of Alemannic origin and were originally settled in the areas that comprise Alsace and are located north of the Rhine, which forms the northern border of Switzerland. These Germans emigrated and settled in the area around Pressburg, north of the Danube, the so-called Oberufer region, and brought these Christmas plays with them as a precious souvenir of their old home further west. Every year, when Christmas approached, the Christmas plays were rehearsed in the village. Actually, they started rehearsing as soon as the grape harvest was over. Then the person who kept these Christmas plays in his family would gather the others around him; it was a well-respected family in the individual villages that had written down these plays, and again the most respected and oldest of the family was the so-called teacher. He gathered the boys around him as soon as the grape harvest was over, in October. Only boys were allowed to play at that time. He gathered the boys he found suitable, not only in an artistic sense, in a folk-artistic sense, but also in a moral and religious sense. Even while studying and preparing, the boys were required to lead particularly pious lives, so that when they performed at Christmas, they would be able to advocate in the right way for what was contained in these plays, through their whole attitude. Then they studied from week to week and it was strictly observed that everything that was around was really observed in these old plays. In fact, everything was laid down, including how each individual was to behave. After these plays had been prepared for a long time, as Christmas approached, those who had been instructed by the teacher for many weeks prepared themselves, and at Christmas time they first went around the village, then went to the inn that had been chosen for the performance. In a simple inn, and with the simplest of means, the story that you will see in today's two plays was performed. These are two examples of how the Holy Story was presented. The first play depicts the story of the Fall of Man, the temptation of Adam and Eve. The second play shows Christ appearing to the shepherds in Bethlehem and everything that followed. Two things, my dear audience, can be seen from these plays. Firstly, how deeply Christianity had penetrated the mind with genuine, honest piety. And on the other hand, how all sentimentality was still alien to these simple people in those days. A sentimental nature, which is always somewhat untrue, something falsely mystical, was not at all connected with this genuine, honest, popular piety. I myself was deeply moved when I, as a very young lad, got to know these Christmas plays through my revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, at the end of the 1770s, beginning of the 1780s of the last century, and I then occupied myself with them a great deal. And so I would like to try to present what, in my opinion, has been celebrated with honest, elementary piety for centuries in German-speaking areas of Central Europe around Christmas time, and which was then brought as a faithful heirloom to the former German colonies in Hungary, as it was presented in those ancient times. Of course, you can't do it quite so primitively. But you have to do it as well as possible. And we do it here in such a way that you get a good idea of what it was like at Christmas in these German colonial villages. So — bringing up a piece of Christian German folklore — these Christmas plays should now appear before you in an unadulterated form. You will see how everything is geared towards making the presentation something intimate that the entire audience - it was, after all, a simple village audience - experienced. So you will see the caroler entering to introduce the whole thing. You will see how he actually forms the bridge from the players to the audience, so that everything can have an extraordinarily affectionate, intimate and heartfelt expression. What I have said to you, which can only cause one to love these traditions from ancient folklore, has led to the fact that we, within our anthroposophical movement, have made it our task every year to perform these old folk plays, and we will do so again this year. And that is why we have invited you. Especially in the second half of the 19th century, so much of these old things disappeared, and we should actually be grateful that a man like Karl Julius Schröer, who was a scholar in folklore, went to the teachers himself and had them tell him what the teachers or those who were fellow players had in their memories. Because they told him something that is truly centuries-old, sacred property. And so it has been preserved. Unfortunately, folklore is only present today in very isolated areas, where, by the way, attempts are being made to preserve it unadulterated. A piece of old folklore comes to life when we immerse ourselves in it, as it can be done through a presentation that is as unadulterated as possible, as we are now attempting. It is with this in mind that we kindly invite you to view this old folk tradition with us. After the two performances of the “Paradeis-Spiel” and the “Christ-Geburt-Spiel” in Dornach on Friday, December 14, 1923, the group of actors traveled to Schaffhausen for a rehearsal on Saturday, where the two plays were performed on Sunday, December 16, 1923. Rudolf Steiner arrived on Sunday and gave a speech, of which no transcript has survived. He then traveled on to Stuttgart. Marie Steiner was in Berlin at the time. —- In the book published in 1967: Rudolf Steiner/Marie Steiner-von Sivers “Correspondence and Documents 1901-1925,” Rudolf Steiner writes several times about this guest performance in preparation.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 14, 1923 14 Dec 1923, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Today we would like to present to you two plays from ancient folklore that belong to the series of plays that were often performed during festive seasons in ancient Christian folklore in the Middle Ages and in many regions.

We must be clear about the fact that from the 12th or 13th century until the last century, until the middle of the last century, the great festivals of the year - Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and some others - were extraordinarily significant events in the year in Christian areas. And just as the Christian year is marked by everything that permeates consciousness, so at special times the human heart is virtually called upon to permeate these memories with that which in turn are the greatest facts in religious life and in religious consciousness.

There are Easter plays, Pentecost plays, Corpus Christi plays, and plays for other holy festivals. The most endearing of these festivals, the ones that most touch the soul, were the Christmas plays. These Christmas plays have been preserved for us particularly from the times when the Middle Ages were coming to an end. And the two plays that we are presenting to you today also come from the late Middle Ages. They were still being performed everywhere in the 16th century, even in the surrounding areas. As is pointed out, they were performed in the areas around here. You can see from this that these plays originally came from a region along the Rhine. But the plays that we are presenting today were not found here in these areas; they were discovered by my old teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer in the middle of the last century in those areas of Upper Hungary that were actually still truly German at the time, but whose German character has long since faded, giving way to Slavic and Magyar elements. German colonies were scattered throughout these areas, as they were throughout Hungary. In the area around Bratislava, north of the Danube, and further over, south of the Carpathians, along the so-called Hungarian highlands to Transylvania; and again down on the lower Danube, in the so-called Banat. In the latter area, the Swabians have settled, who emigrated from Germany; in the areas of northern Hungary, in the areas from which these plays originate, we have Saxon colonists. But those who have cultivated these plays are probably even of Alemannic origin and were originally settled in the areas that comprise Alsace and are located north of the Rhine, which forms the northern border of Switzerland. These Germans emigrated and settled in the area around Pressburg, north of the Danube, the so-called Oberufer region, and brought these Christmas plays with them as a precious souvenir of their old home further west.

Every year, when Christmas approached, the Christmas plays were rehearsed in the village. Actually, they started rehearsing as soon as the grape harvest was over. Then the person who kept these Christmas plays in his family would gather the others around him; it was a well-respected family in the individual villages that had written down these plays, and again the most respected and oldest of the family was the so-called teacher. He gathered the boys around him as soon as the grape harvest was over, in October. Only boys were allowed to play at that time. He gathered the boys he found suitable, not only in an artistic sense, in a folk-artistic sense, but also in a moral and religious sense. Even while studying and preparing, the boys were required to lead particularly pious lives, so that when they performed at Christmas, they would be able to advocate in the right way for what was contained in these plays, through their whole attitude. Then they studied from week to week and it was strictly observed that everything that was around was really observed in these old plays. In fact, everything was laid down, including how each individual was to behave. After these plays had been prepared for a long time, as Christmas approached, those who had been instructed by the teacher for many weeks prepared themselves, and at Christmas time they first went around the village, then went to the inn that had been chosen for the performance. In a simple inn, and with the simplest of means, the story that you will see in today's two plays was performed. These are two examples of how the Holy Story was presented.

The first play depicts the story of the Fall of Man, the temptation of Adam and Eve. The second play shows Christ appearing to the shepherds in Bethlehem and everything that followed.

Two things, my dear audience, can be seen from these plays. Firstly, how deeply Christianity had penetrated the mind with genuine, honest piety. And on the other hand, how all sentimentality was still alien to these simple people in those days. A sentimental nature, which is always somewhat untrue, something falsely mystical, was not at all connected with this genuine, honest, popular piety.

I myself was deeply moved when I, as a very young lad, got to know these Christmas plays through my revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, at the end of the 1770s, beginning of the 1780s of the last century, and I then occupied myself with them a great deal. And so I would like to try to present what, in my opinion, has been celebrated with honest, elementary piety for centuries in German-speaking areas of Central Europe around Christmas time, and which was then brought as a faithful heirloom to the former German colonies in Hungary, as it was presented in those ancient times. Of course, you can't do it quite so primitively. But you have to do it as well as possible. And we do it here in such a way that you get a good idea of what it was like at Christmas in these German colonial villages. So — bringing up a piece of Christian German folklore — these Christmas plays should now appear before you in an unadulterated form.

You will see how everything is geared towards making the presentation something intimate that the entire audience - it was, after all, a simple village audience - experienced. So you will see the caroler entering to introduce the whole thing. You will see how he actually forms the bridge from the players to the audience, so that everything can have an extraordinarily affectionate, intimate and heartfelt expression. What I have said to you, which can only cause one to love these traditions from ancient folklore, has led to the fact that we, within our anthroposophical movement, have made it our task every year to perform these old folk plays, and we will do so again this year. And that is why we have invited you.

Especially in the second half of the 19th century, so much of these old things disappeared, and we should actually be grateful that a man like Karl Julius Schröer, who was a scholar in folklore, went to the teachers himself and had them tell him what the teachers or those who were fellow players had in their memories. Because they told him something that is truly centuries-old, sacred property. And so it has been preserved. Unfortunately, folklore is only present today in very isolated areas, where, by the way, attempts are being made to preserve it unadulterated. A piece of old folklore comes to life when we immerse ourselves in it, as it can be done through a presentation that is as unadulterated as possible, as we are now attempting. It is with this in mind that we kindly invite you to view this old folk tradition with us.

After the two performances of the “Paradeis-Spiel” and the “Christ-Geburt-Spiel” in Dornach on Friday, December 14, 1923, the group of actors traveled to Schaffhausen for a rehearsal on Saturday, where the two plays were performed on Sunday, December 16, 1923. Rudolf Steiner arrived on Sunday and gave a speech, of which no transcript has survived. He then traveled on to Stuttgart. Marie Steiner was in Berlin at the time. —- In the book published in 1967: Rudolf Steiner/Marie Steiner-von Sivers “Correspondence and Documents 1901-1925,” Rudolf Steiner writes several times about this guest performance in preparation.

127. Festivals of the Seasons: Christmas: A Festival of Inspiration 21 Dec 1911, Berlin Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner
It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays.
A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man.

127. Festivals of the Seasons: Christmas: A Festival of Inspiration 21 Dec 1911, Berlin
Translated by Harry Collison
Rudolf Steiner

It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays.

A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man.

127. Festivals of the Seasons: Christmas: A Festival of Inspiration 21 Dec 1911, Berlin Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner
From within our work in the Anthroposophical movement we look forward into the future of humanity and we let our souls and hearts be permeated with that which we believe will embody itself in the streams of evolution and in the forces of evolution of the future of humanity. When we contemplate the great truths of existence, when we look up to the Forces, Powers and Beings who reveal themselves to us in the spiritual worlds as the cause and foundation of all that meets us in the sense-world, here also we rejoice to know that the truths which we bring down from the spiritual worlds will and must be gradually realised more and more in the souls and hearts of the men of the future. Thus for the greater part of the year our spiritual gaze is directed either to the immediate present or the future. All the more do we feel ourselves impelled on the special days of the year—on the Festivals which come through to us from time and its changes as set reminders of that which earlier humanity imagined and devised—on these feast days we feel ourselves impelled to realise our union with this earlier humanity, to sink ourselves a little into that which led men of past time out of fulness of heart and soul to place these sign-marks in the course of time which come down to us as the ‘Festivals of the year.’ If the Easter Festival is such as to awaken in us, when we understand it, thoughts of human powers and of the power of overcoming all the lower through the higher, everything externally physical through the spiritual, if the Easter Festival is a festival of resurrection, of awaking, a festival of hope and confidence in the spiritual forces which can be awakened in the human soul; so, on the other hand, the Christmas Festival is a festival of the realisation of harmony with the whole cosmos, a festival of the realisation of Grace. It is a festival that can again and again bring home the thought: No matter how doubtful everything around us may appear, however much the bitterest doubts may enter into faith, however much the worst disappointments may mingle with the most aspiring hopes, however much all that is good around us in life may totter, there is something in human nature and essence—this the rightly understood thought of the Christmas Festival may say—that only needs to be brought vitally, spiritually, before the soul, which reveals to us perpetually that we are descended from the powers of good, from the forces of right, from the forces of the true. The Easter thought points us to our victorious forces in the future—the Christmas thought points us, in a certain sense, to the origin of man in the primeval past. In such a case one can clearly see, how the unconscious or subconscious reason or spirituality of man stands far, far higher than man with his consciousness can wholly compass. We have often reason to admire that which men have established in the past out of the hidden depths of the soul more than that which they have established out of their intellectual thoughts and understanding. How infinitely wise it appears to us, when we open the calendar, and for the 25th December we find registered the Birth-Festival of Christ Jesus, and then we see registered in the calender for the 24th December ‘Adam and Eve.’ It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays. In short, there was something in the deep hidden soul-depths of men which caused them to place directly together the earthly beginning of humanity and the Jesus Birth Festival. In the year 353, even in ecclesiastical Rome, the 25th December was not kept as the Festival of the Birthday of Jesus. Only in 354 the Jesus Birthday Festival was celebrated for the first time in ecclesiastical Rome. Previous to this, there was a festival which brought to men a consciousness similar to the Jesus Birth Festival, namely, the 6th January, the day of remembrance of the Baptism by John in Jordan, the day which was commemorative of the Descent of the Christ from the spiritual heights, and the Self-immersion of the Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That was originally the Birth of the Christ in Jesus, the remembrance of the great historical moment which is symbolically presented to us as the hovering dove over the head of Jesus of Nazareth. The 6th January was the commemorative day of the birth of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. In the fourth century, however, it had for a long time been impossible for the self-assertive materialistic philosophy of the West to understand the penetration of Jesus with the Christ. Like a powerful fight this thought with instantaneous illumination was present to the Gnostics, who were in a certain respect contemporaries or direct followers of the Event of Golgotha. They were in the position of finding it unnecessary to seek the depth of this wisdom of the ‘Christ’ in ‘Jesus’ as we have to seek this wisdom again through modern clairvoyance. The Gnostics were able, by means of the last flickering of those old, original human clairvoyant powers to see, as it were, in the light of grace that which we must acquire again for ourselves concerning the great secrets of Golgotha. Much was clear to the Gnostics which we have to acquire again, for example, in particular, the secret of the birth of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism by John in Jordan. Just as the old clairvoyance faded away for humanity generally, so did also the peculiar kindling of the highest clairvoyant power, of the highest Christmas light of humanity, which the Gnostics possessed. In the fourth century Western Christianity was no longer able to understand this great thought. Hence in the fourth century the true meaning of the Festival of the appearing of the Christ in Jesus was lost to Western civilisation. Man had forgotten what this ‘Festival of the Appearing’ of the 6th January actually meant. They had for a time—yes, right into our time, buried under much materialistic intellectual rubbish what indeed would not allow itself to be destroyed, the feeling toward the Christ-Figure in human evolution. If man could not understand that One Most High, as compared with humanity, had manifested Himself in the Baptism by John in Jordan, yet he could understand,—for that did not contradict materialistic knowledge,—that that bodily organism which was selected for the reception of the Christ was something significant. Hence they put back the Spirit-birth, which indeed took place in the John-Baptism in Jordan, to the Child-birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and set the ‘Jesus-Birth-Festival’ in place of the ‘Festival of the Appearing.’ To represent quite rightly and in detail, that which became the Christmas Festival of humanity always aroused significant feelings, high exalted feelings. Something significant lived in the human soul at the approach of Christmas, which may be expressed as follows: If man contemplates the world in the right sense, he can, by belief in humanity, fortify himself against certain things, against all life’s dangers and blows of fate; in the feeling of love and peace man can fortify himself in his deepest soul against all disharmony and strife of life. This is something which becomes ever more clearly bound up with the Christmas Festival. For what was it actually of which man reminded himself? From our anthroposophical point of view let us look at what man remembered. We know what significant, real and powerful preparations human evolution had to go through in order that the Mystery of Golgotha could enter this human evolution. The human being who was the reincarnated Zarathustra, had to be born as one of the two Jesus children. He also had to be born for whom the real Jesus-Birth-Festival was the commemorative festival; he had to be born whose soul-substance had remained in the spiritual worlds. So long as humanity went through all that was possible within heredity through the generations up to the Mystery of Golgotha—for all other human souls had gone through the generations—so long had man been taking up the destroying forces that crept right into the blood. One single soul substance had remained behind in the spiritual worlds, guarded by the purest Mysteries and Mystery-centres, and then it was poured out into humanity as the soul of the second Jesus-child, the child of the Luke Gospel, that Jesus-child to whose birth all the commemorations and representations of the Christ-Festival, of Christmas, belong. At Christmas-time men’s thoughts went back to the origin of humanity, to the human soul, which had not yet descended, not even into Adam’s nature. They would say: In Bethlehem, in Palestine was born that soul-substance which had not taken part in the descent of humanity, but had remained behind, and for the first time in fact entered into a human body, in incarnating in the Jesus described by Luke. The human soul, when its thought is directed to the fact, may feel: One can believe in humanity, one can have faith in humanity; however much conflict, however much disbelief, however much disharmony has entered into it—and they have entered into all that has flowed into humanity from the time of Adam to the present—when one looks back on that which in olden times was called ‘Adam Kadmon,’ which became later the ‘Christ’ conception, there was kindled in the human soul confidence in the soundness of human force, and there was kindled confidence in the primeval peace-and-love nature of humanity. Hence the subconscious soul of man drew together the Jesus-birth Festival and the Adam and Eve Festival because man saw in fact his own nature in the Christ Child that was born, but his own nature in its innocence, in its purity. Why then was the Divine Child placed before humanity for hundreds and thousands of years as the highest there was for the human soul to revere? For the reason that when man looks at a child and sees the child not yet able to say ‘I’ to himself, he can know that the child is still working on the human body, the Temple of the Eternally Divine, and because the human child who cannot yet say ‘I’ nevertheless clearly shows the sign of his origin from the spiritual world. Through this contemplation of the child nature man learns to have full trust in human nature. Here, where he can most easily foregather, when the sun shines least and warms the earth least, when he is not busied with the ordering of his outer affairs, here, when the days are shortest and the nights longest, when the earth gives him the best opportunity to foregather and to enter into himself, when all outer brightness, all outer beauty withdraws for a while from the outward view—here, the Western civilisation places the Birth-Festival of the Divine Child, that is, of the Human Being who enters the world pure and unsullied—and through the innocent entrance into the world can give to man at the time of his closest assembling with others, the strongest, the highest confidence through the knowledge of his divine origin. To the anthroposophist it is a confirmation of the great truth that one can learn most from the child, when one sees that a festival of a child’s birth is placed in the course of time as a great significant festival of confidence in human evolution. So we admire the subconscious, the spiritual reason of the men of the past, who have placed such sign posts in the path of time. We feel then like those who decipher wonderful hieroglyphs, produced by the men of old through the placing of such festivals in the writing of the times and we feel one with these men of old. Whilst at other times our look is directed towards the future, whilst at other times we are willing to place our best powers at the disposal of the future, to strengthen and increase all faith in the future, here, on such festival days, we seek just to live in remembrance, to draw towards us as though incarnated the old thoughts teaching us at the present time that we can think truly in our way of what lies in the spiritual at the foundation of the external world; but that in earlier times—in a different way, it is true, but not less right, not less magnificent and significant—the True and Sublime was thought and experienced through the realisation of the oneness of humanity and the high possibilities that then lay ahead of humanity. This is our anthroposophical ideal, to be able to feel one with that which the men of old produced—often from the most hidden depths of the soul. These festivals, particularly the great ones, encourage this, if we can only through the anthroposophical truths imprint in our souls the significance of the hieroglyphic signs written in the path of time. A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man. There comes before us the wonderful picture of the manger, how the beasts bow before this primal man; to these may be added those wonderful stories, as for instance that when Mary had taken the Child Jesus on the way to Egypt, a tree bowed itself, a very ancient tree, as the border was crossed by Mary with the child. Traditionally the legends of almost the whole of Europe relate that the trees in a remarkable way, in the Holy Night, bow to this great event. We could go to Alsace, to Bavaria, everywhere we find legends, how certain trees bear fruit in the Holy Night. All wonderful symbols which proclaim in fact how the birth of the Jesus-Child reveals itself as something which is connected with the whole life of the earth. When we recollect what we have so often said—that the ancient spiritual streams were given by the Gods to mankind, and how in ancient times men had clairvoyant insight into the divine spiritual world, how this clairvoyance gradually vanished from humanity in order that men might be able to come to the gaining of the ego—if we picture how here, in the whole human organisation something like a drying-up, a withering, of the old divine forces is taking place, and how through the Christ-Impulse which came through the Mystery of Golgotha there is a flooding of the withering divine forces with new water of life; then there appears to us in a wonderful picture what the Christmas legends relate to us, how the dried up and withered roses of Jericho shoot up of themselves in the Holy Night. That is a legend which we find everywhere noted down in the Middle Ages, that the roses of Jericho blossom in the Christ-night and unfold, because they first unfolded under the footsteps of Mary, who, when she carried the Child Jesus on the journey to Egypt, stepped over a place where a rose tree was growing. A wonderful symbol of what happened to human divine powers, that even things so dry and lifeless as that which one usually finds on the wayside, as the roses which apparently are dead, can spring up again and shoot forth through the Christ-Impulse which entered into the time evolution. That to man was first given in reality what was destined from the beginning is expressed in the Jesus-Birth Festival, in the festival of the Birth of the Jesus infant. Before Adam and Eve existed, that was destined for humanity—so the Christmas legend says—which yet lies in the quite unspoilt divine child-nature of man. In truth however—and really on account of the influence of Lucifer—man has only been able to attain it after the whole period of time from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha. A deep emotion awakens in our souls when we take for our meditation a feeling, compressed into the one night of the 24th and 25th December, of what mankind has become from Adam and Eve to the birth of Christ in Jesus, through the Luciferic powers. If we can realise that, we shall really grasp the significance of this Festival, and realise the goal before humanity. It is as though humanity, if it would use its opportunity and take these sign posts of time as material for meditation, could really become aware of its pure origin in the cosmic forces of the universe. Here, looking up into the cosmic forces of the universe and penetrating a little by means of Anthroposophy, through the true spiritual wisdom into the secrets of the universe, humanity can first become ripe to understand this, that what as the Christ-Birth Festival was once understood by the Gnostics, was in fact the festival celebrated on January 6th, the Festival of the Birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, as a higher stage of the Birth-Festival of Jesus. To enable us to plunge into the twelve great Forces of the universe, the twelve Holy Nights are set between the Christmas Festival and the festival which should be celebrated on the sixth of January, which now is the festival of the Three Holy Kings, and which in fact is the festival we have been speaking about. Again, without man’s really knowing it in present knowledge, these twelve Holy Nights are established out of the hidden wise depths of the soul of mankind, as though they would say: ‘Realise the depths of the Christmas Festival, but sink during the twelve Holy Nights into the holiest secrets of the cosmos, that is, in the realms of the universe out of which Christ descended to the Earth.’ Only when mankind wills to be inspired through the thought of the holy childlike divine origin of man, to let himself be inspired by the wisdom that works through the twelve forces, through the twelve holy forces of the universe, symbolically presented in the twelve signs of the Zodiac, due in truth to spiritual wisdom—only when mankind sinks into true spiritual wisdom and learns to discern the course of time in the great cosmos and in the single human being, only then will the mankind of the future, fructified through Spiritual Science, find to its own salvation the inspiration which can come from the Jesus-Birth Festival so that thoughts for the future may be permeated with fullest confidence and richest hopes. Thus we may as anthroposophists allow the Christmas Festival to work on our souls as an inspiration festival, as a festival that brings the thought of human origin in the holy divine primeval human child so wonderfully before our souls. That light which appears to us in the Holy Night as the symbol of the Light of humanity at its source, that Light which is symbolically presented to us later in the lights of the Christmas-tree, rightly understood, is the Light that can give to our striving souls the best and strongest forces for our true real world-peace, for the true blessedness and real hope for the world. Let us feel ourselves strengthened for the needs of the-future by such thoughts on the facts of the past, on the establishing of the festivals in the past; Christmas thoughts, remembrance thoughts on the origin of humanity, thoughts well-rooted which will unfold themselves to real, to most mighty soul-plants for the true future of humanity.

127. Festivals of the Seasons: Christmas: A Festival of Inspiration 21 Dec 1911, Berlin
Translated by Harry Collison
Rudolf Steiner

From within our work in the Anthroposophical movement we look forward into the future of humanity and we let our souls and hearts be permeated with that which we believe will embody itself in the streams of evolution and in the forces of evolution of the future of humanity. When we contemplate the great truths of existence, when we look up to the Forces, Powers and Beings who reveal themselves to us in the spiritual worlds as the cause and foundation of all that meets us in the sense-world, here also we rejoice to know that the truths which we bring down from the spiritual worlds will and must be gradually realised more and more in the souls and hearts of the men of the future. Thus for the greater part of the year our spiritual gaze is directed either to the immediate present or the future.

All the more do we feel ourselves impelled on the special days of the year—on the Festivals which come through to us from time and its changes as set reminders of that which earlier humanity imagined and devised—on these feast days we feel ourselves impelled to realise our union with this earlier humanity, to sink ourselves a little into that which led men of past time out of fulness of heart and soul to place these sign-marks in the course of time which come down to us as the ‘Festivals of the year.’ If the Easter Festival is such as to awaken in us, when we understand it, thoughts of human powers and of the power of overcoming all the lower through the higher, everything externally physical through the spiritual, if the Easter Festival is a festival of resurrection, of awaking, a festival of hope and confidence in the spiritual forces which can be awakened in the human soul; so, on the other hand, the Christmas Festival is a festival of the realisation of harmony with the whole cosmos, a festival of the realisation of Grace. It is a festival that can again and again bring home the thought: No matter how doubtful everything around us may appear, however much the bitterest doubts may enter into faith, however much the worst disappointments may mingle with the most aspiring hopes, however much all that is good around us in life may totter, there is something in human nature and essence—this the rightly understood thought of the Christmas Festival may say—that only needs to be brought vitally, spiritually, before the soul, which reveals to us perpetually that we are descended from the powers of good, from the forces of right, from the forces of the true. The Easter thought points us to our victorious forces in the future—the Christmas thought points us, in a certain sense, to the origin of man in the primeval past.

In such a case one can clearly see, how the unconscious or subconscious reason or spirituality of man stands far, far higher than man with his consciousness can wholly compass. We have often reason to admire that which men have established in the past out of the hidden depths of the soul more than that which they have established out of their intellectual thoughts and understanding. How infinitely wise it appears to us, when we open the calendar, and for the 25th December we find registered the Birth-Festival of Christ Jesus, and then we see registered in the calender for the 24th December ‘Adam and Eve.’ It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays. In short, there was something in the deep hidden soul-depths of men which caused them to place directly together the earthly beginning of humanity and the Jesus Birth Festival. In the year 353, even in ecclesiastical Rome, the 25th December was not kept as the Festival of the Birthday of Jesus. Only in 354 the Jesus Birthday Festival was celebrated for the first time in ecclesiastical Rome. Previous to this, there was a festival which brought to men a consciousness similar to the Jesus Birth Festival, namely, the 6th January, the day of remembrance of the Baptism by John in Jordan, the day which was commemorative of the Descent of the Christ from the spiritual heights, and the Self-immersion of the Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That was originally the Birth of the Christ in Jesus, the remembrance of the great historical moment which is symbolically presented to us as the hovering dove over the head of Jesus of Nazareth. The 6th January was the commemorative day of the birth of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. In the fourth century, however, it had for a long time been impossible for the self-assertive materialistic philosophy of the West to understand the penetration of Jesus with the Christ. Like a powerful fight this thought with instantaneous illumination was present to the Gnostics, who were in a certain respect contemporaries or direct followers of the Event of Golgotha. They were in the position of finding it unnecessary to seek the depth of this wisdom of the ‘Christ’ in ‘Jesus’ as we have to seek this wisdom again through modern clairvoyance. The Gnostics were able, by means of the last flickering of those old, original human clairvoyant powers to see, as it were, in the light of grace that which we must acquire again for ourselves concerning the great secrets of Golgotha. Much was clear to the Gnostics which we have to acquire again, for example, in particular, the secret of the birth of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism by John in Jordan.

Just as the old clairvoyance faded away for humanity generally, so did also the peculiar kindling of the highest clairvoyant power, of the highest Christmas light of humanity, which the Gnostics possessed. In the fourth century Western Christianity was no longer able to understand this great thought. Hence in the fourth century the true meaning of the Festival of the appearing of the Christ in Jesus was lost to Western civilisation. Man had forgotten what this ‘Festival of the Appearing’ of the 6th January actually meant. They had for a time—yes, right into our time, buried under much materialistic intellectual rubbish what indeed would not allow itself to be destroyed, the feeling toward the Christ-Figure in human evolution. If man could not understand that One Most High, as compared with humanity, had manifested Himself in the Baptism by John in Jordan, yet he could understand,—for that did not contradict materialistic knowledge,—that that bodily organism which was selected for the reception of the Christ was something significant. Hence they put back the Spirit-birth, which indeed took place in the John-Baptism in Jordan, to the Child-birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and set the ‘Jesus-Birth-Festival’ in place of the ‘Festival of the Appearing.’ To represent quite rightly and in detail, that which became the Christmas Festival of humanity always aroused significant feelings, high exalted feelings. Something significant lived in the human soul at the approach of Christmas, which may be expressed as follows: If man contemplates the world in the right sense, he can, by belief in humanity, fortify himself against certain things, against all life’s dangers and blows of fate; in the feeling of love and peace man can fortify himself in his deepest soul against all disharmony and strife of life. This is something which becomes ever more clearly bound up with the Christmas Festival. For what was it actually of which man reminded himself? From our anthroposophical point of view let us look at what man remembered.

We know what significant, real and powerful preparations human evolution had to go through in order that the Mystery of Golgotha could enter this human evolution. The human being who was the reincarnated Zarathustra, had to be born as one of the two Jesus children. He also had to be born for whom the real Jesus-Birth-Festival was the commemorative festival; he had to be born whose soul-substance had remained in the spiritual worlds. So long as humanity went through all that was possible within heredity through the generations up to the Mystery of Golgotha—for all other human souls had gone through the generations—so long had man been taking up the destroying forces that crept right into the blood. One single soul substance had remained behind in the spiritual worlds, guarded by the purest Mysteries and Mystery-centres, and then it was poured out into humanity as the soul of the second Jesus-child, the child of the Luke Gospel, that Jesus-child to whose birth all the commemorations and representations of the Christ-Festival, of Christmas, belong. At Christmas-time men’s thoughts went back to the origin of humanity, to the human soul, which had not yet descended, not even into Adam’s nature. They would say: In Bethlehem, in Palestine was born that soul-substance which had not taken part in the descent of humanity, but had remained behind, and for the first time in fact entered into a human body, in incarnating in the Jesus described by Luke. The human soul, when its thought is directed to the fact, may feel: One can believe in humanity, one can have faith in humanity; however much conflict, however much disbelief, however much disharmony has entered into it—and they have entered into all that has flowed into humanity from the time of Adam to the present—when one looks back on that which in olden times was called ‘Adam Kadmon,’ which became later the ‘Christ’ conception, there was kindled in the human soul confidence in the soundness of human force, and there was kindled confidence in the primeval peace-and-love nature of humanity. Hence the subconscious soul of man drew together the Jesus-birth Festival and the Adam and Eve Festival because man saw in fact his own nature in the Christ Child that was born, but his own nature in its innocence, in its purity.

Why then was the Divine Child placed before humanity for hundreds and thousands of years as the highest there was for the human soul to revere? For the reason that when man looks at a child and sees the child not yet able to say ‘I’ to himself, he can know that the child is still working on the human body, the Temple of the Eternally Divine, and because the human child who cannot yet say ‘I’ nevertheless clearly shows the sign of his origin from the spiritual world. Through this contemplation of the child nature man learns to have full trust in human nature. Here, where he can most easily foregather, when the sun shines least and warms the earth least, when he is not busied with the ordering of his outer affairs, here, when the days are shortest and the nights longest, when the earth gives him the best opportunity to foregather and to enter into himself, when all outer brightness, all outer beauty withdraws for a while from the outward view—here, the Western civilisation places the Birth-Festival of the Divine Child, that is, of the Human Being who enters the world pure and unsullied—and through the innocent entrance into the world can give to man at the time of his closest assembling with others, the strongest, the highest confidence through the knowledge of his divine origin.

To the anthroposophist it is a confirmation of the great truth that one can learn most from the child, when one sees that a festival of a child’s birth is placed in the course of time as a great significant festival of confidence in human evolution. So we admire the subconscious, the spiritual reason of the men of the past, who have placed such sign posts in the path of time. We feel then like those who decipher wonderful hieroglyphs, produced by the men of old through the placing of such festivals in the writing of the times and we feel one with these men of old. Whilst at other times our look is directed towards the future, whilst at other times we are willing to place our best powers at the disposal of the future, to strengthen and increase all faith in the future, here, on such festival days, we seek just to live in remembrance, to draw towards us as though incarnated the old thoughts teaching us at the present time that we can think truly in our way of what lies in the spiritual at the foundation of the external world; but that in earlier times—in a different way, it is true, but not less right, not less magnificent and significant—the True and Sublime was thought and experienced through the realisation of the oneness of humanity and the high possibilities that then lay ahead of humanity. This is our anthroposophical ideal, to be able to feel one with that which the men of old produced—often from the most hidden depths of the soul. These festivals, particularly the great ones, encourage this, if we can only through the anthroposophical truths imprint in our souls the significance of the hieroglyphic signs written in the path of time.

A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man. There comes before us the wonderful picture of the manger, how the beasts bow before this primal man; to these may be added those wonderful stories, as for instance that when Mary had taken the Child Jesus on the way to Egypt, a tree bowed itself, a very ancient tree, as the border was crossed by Mary with the child. Traditionally the legends of almost the whole of Europe relate that the trees in a remarkable way, in the Holy Night, bow to this great event. We could go to Alsace, to Bavaria, everywhere we find legends, how certain trees bear fruit in the Holy Night. All wonderful symbols which proclaim in fact how the birth of the Jesus-Child reveals itself as something which is connected with the whole life of the earth. When we recollect what we have so often said—that the ancient spiritual streams were given by the Gods to mankind, and how in ancient times men had clairvoyant insight into the divine spiritual world, how this clairvoyance gradually vanished from humanity in order that men might be able to come to the gaining of the ego—if we picture how here, in the whole human organisation something like a drying-up, a withering, of the old divine forces is taking place, and how through the Christ-Impulse which came through the Mystery of Golgotha there is a flooding of the withering divine forces with new water of life; then there appears to us in a wonderful picture what the Christmas legends relate to us, how the dried up and withered roses of Jericho shoot up of themselves in the Holy Night. That is a legend which we find everywhere noted down in the Middle Ages, that the roses of Jericho blossom in the Christ-night and unfold, because they first unfolded under the footsteps of Mary, who, when she carried the Child Jesus on the journey to Egypt, stepped over a place where a rose tree was growing. A wonderful symbol of what happened to human divine powers, that even things so dry and lifeless as that which one usually finds on the wayside, as the roses which apparently are dead, can spring up again and shoot forth through the Christ-Impulse which entered into the time evolution.

That to man was first given in reality what was destined from the beginning is expressed in the Jesus-Birth Festival, in the festival of the Birth of the Jesus infant. Before Adam and Eve existed, that was destined for humanity—so the Christmas legend says—which yet lies in the quite unspoilt divine child-nature of man. In truth however—and really on account of the influence of Lucifer—man has only been able to attain it after the whole period of time from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A deep emotion awakens in our souls when we take for our meditation a feeling, compressed into the one night of the 24th and 25th December, of what mankind has become from Adam and Eve to the birth of Christ in Jesus, through the Luciferic powers. If we can realise that, we shall really grasp the significance of this Festival, and realise the goal before humanity. It is as though humanity, if it would use its opportunity and take these sign posts of time as material for meditation, could really become aware of its pure origin in the cosmic forces of the universe. Here, looking up into the cosmic forces of the universe and penetrating a little by means of Anthroposophy, through the true spiritual wisdom into the secrets of the universe, humanity can first become ripe to understand this, that what as the Christ-Birth Festival was once understood by the Gnostics, was in fact the festival celebrated on January 6th, the Festival of the Birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, as a higher stage of the Birth-Festival of Jesus. To enable us to plunge into the twelve great Forces of the universe, the twelve Holy Nights are set between the Christmas Festival and the festival which should be celebrated on the sixth of January, which now is the festival of the Three Holy Kings, and which in fact is the festival we have been speaking about.

Again, without man’s really knowing it in present knowledge, these twelve Holy Nights are established out of the hidden wise depths of the soul of mankind, as though they would say: ‘Realise the depths of the Christmas Festival, but sink during the twelve Holy Nights into the holiest secrets of the cosmos, that is, in the realms of the universe out of which Christ descended to the Earth.’ Only when mankind wills to be inspired through the thought of the holy childlike divine origin of man, to let himself be inspired by the wisdom that works through the twelve forces, through the twelve holy forces of the universe, symbolically presented in the twelve signs of the Zodiac, due in truth to spiritual wisdom—only when mankind sinks into true spiritual wisdom and learns to discern the course of time in the great cosmos and in the single human being, only then will the mankind of the future, fructified through Spiritual Science, find to its own salvation the inspiration which can come from the Jesus-Birth Festival so that thoughts for the future may be permeated with fullest confidence and richest hopes.

Thus we may as anthroposophists allow the Christmas Festival to work on our souls as an inspiration festival, as a festival that brings the thought of human origin in the holy divine primeval human child so wonderfully before our souls. That light which appears to us in the Holy Night as the symbol of the Light of humanity at its source, that Light which is symbolically presented to us later in the lights of the Christmas-tree, rightly understood, is the Light that can give to our striving souls the best and strongest forces for our true real world-peace, for the true blessedness and real hope for the world.

Let us feel ourselves strengthened for the needs of the-future by such thoughts on the facts of the past, on the establishing of the festivals in the past; Christmas thoughts, remembrance thoughts on the origin of humanity, thoughts well-rooted which will unfold themselves to real, to most mighty soul-plants for the true future of humanity.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 24, 1922 24 Dec 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
They regarded the performance of such plays as something quite serious. Then, when Advent and later Christmas time had arrived, these plays were performed in an inn.
As I said, Karl Julius Schröer still saw these plays performed by the farmers of the Haiddörfer in the 1950s. It was at that time, especially around Christmas time, that I heard about these folk plays from him.
Many of these Christmas plays have also been collected by others, but it seems to me that these plays of the Haidbauern are the ones in which what once existed in the late Middle Ages has been preserved most purely.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 24, 1922 24 Dec 1922, Dornach Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Steiner Online Library As we have done for many years, we would like to present a Christmas play to you this year, a folk play that takes us back to a dramatic-political time of the people, a play that has been cultivated long before the modern work of the stage and stage acting arose within Europe, in the newer Europe at all. The plays that are performed here with us – the Adam and Eve play, which was performed yesterday ¹ and will be performed again in the next few days, and today's play, the Christ-Birth-Play, and the play that will also be performed in the next few days, the Epiphany Play – I first became acquainted with these plays almost forty years ago through my long-dead friend and teacher, Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer was a personality who, in the second half of the 19th century, made a very special contribution to the study of those German dialects that belong to the German colonists who once – probably as early as the 16th century, but certainly in the 17th century – from areas that are are not so far from us here, from southern Germany and perhaps northern Switzerland, to the east; German colonists who settled in western Hungary, in northern and southern western Hungary, and then also in northern Hungary, south of the Carpathians, and in other areas of Hungary. Karl Julius Schröer traveled to all of these areas and studied the various dialects in the most diverse ways. It was the case that the essence of the people was already in decline even back then; other ethnic groups took in these peoples and absorbed them. They are extraordinarily interesting and beautiful books, which appeared in the guise of a dictionary, but which are nevertheless extraordinarily interesting for anyone who wants to study them. These books are written in the language that, as I said, originated in the western German regions not far from us and was then carried eastward to the Danube and the Carpathians by colonists. Karl Julius Schröer found these Christmas plays, which we are performing here, among these people in the 1850s; he got to know them there. These Christmas plays probably originated in the 16th century or even earlier among the people when they still lived more in western Germany, as far as the Rhine. We can still see this from certain sentences in the plays themselves. When they had to emigrate, they were taken with them by the people and were performed again and again every year in the colonists' land, in Hungary. The plays listed here were performed every year by the Haidbauern, a group of farmers who live near Bratislava, in what is now Czechoslovakia, and who have long preserved the original style of their ancient folk traditions. These plays were performed there every year in the dialect that these people brought with them from the west to the east. These folk plays have been preserved in a more genuine form among these colonists than in other areas where similar plays were also performed. For those who have separated from the tribe of their folklore and have gone abroad have truly preserved such things as a sacred treasure. Among the poor people of Oberufer and the neighboring areas on the Hungarian Danube island of Schütt, for example, it was the case that in a particularly respected family, copies of these plays were passed down from father to son and from son to grandson. The one who was allowed to preserve these plays was usually also the one who had received the oral tradition of how to play them from his ancestors. He was the so-called teacher. He might gather, with an assistant, in the fall, after the grape harvest was over, those local boys whom he considered suitable to perform the plays. Only young men were used for this; a practice we cannot imitate. These young men were entrusted with something serious during this time. Above all, they had to lead an extraordinary, moral life and had to live peacefully with the other villagers during the whole period from the grape harvest to Advent. Only then were they considered worthy to actually participate in the plays that were performed from Advent to Epiphany. In these plays, the people expressed what was right for their views, for their aesthetic enjoyment, I would say. But at the same time, these plays were - their subjects are taken from the most important parts of biblical history, the most important for the people - an expression of the people's deepest piety. That is why, for example, during the entire period in which the plays were practiced, no music was allowed to be performed in the village that was different from the music that belonged to the plays. And it has been handed down to us that when some traveling players came to a village, they had the village musicians play in their honor. They were quite indignant: Do they think we are comedians that this music offends us? They regarded the performance of such plays as something quite serious. Then, when Advent and later Christmas time had arrived, these plays were performed in an inn. The people, however, actually carried their pious, truly pious minds, their holy mood, I would like to say, into this inn. These plays have a genuinely folksy character in that, firstly, they are part of the broad development of European theater. You can see this in the after-effects of the images, because these are always interspersed in the action of the plays. You can see how the theater tradition from ancient Greece has continued in these simple folk plays. But there is something else that is much, much more important. It is this: that between the most tender, genuine scenes of devotion, there are always interposed scenes of the people engaged in robust fun. This is precisely what is peculiar about these pieces, juxtaposed as they are, for example, with the figure of the Virgin Mary, who is portrayed with extraordinary delicacy and marked with wonderfully pious devotion, and the somewhat clumsy Joseph. The scene where the shepherds exchange funny jokes with one another in the field, and so on, is not particularly delicately depicted in the scene where, for example, the shepherds sacrifice to the child Jesus, in addition to the touching, pious, holy scene. But this shows us how those whose names have not been preserved, who created these plays out of genuine popular sentiment, knew the true, honest piety of the people, which never became sentimental. It was honest precisely when it did not fall into dishonest sentimentality, when laughter and rough jokes could be tolerated at the same time. And in a beautiful way, those who created such plays knew how to shape the coarse folk fun into something that, I would say, wants to reach heaven in a tender, pious worship. As I said, Karl Julius Schröer still saw these plays performed by the farmers of the Haiddörfer in the 1950s. It was at that time, especially around Christmas time, that I heard about these folk plays from him. He spoke with tremendous inner devotion, because he loved everything that was folksy, and there was something in his words of a reflection of the consecration that the farmers associated with these plays. He then gave me the little book in which he had followed these plays in the 1960s, and I was able to have many a conversation with him afterwards, in which he carefully pointed out the way in which the dialect was used, the way in which the language was formed in a rural, artistic way, one could say. So we were able to talk about gestures, about the whole structure of the play. It was truly a revelation of genuine folk art; at the time, it really grew quite close to my heart. And when we were able to perform such a play within the Anthroposophical Society many years ago, it was my particular endeavor to always perform these plays at Christmas time, as far as it was possible with the means used, which were available for a stage, so that an image was given of what the people had in ancient times and what they still had in certain areas until recently. Now these plays have been largely lost. We were allowed to perform the plays even during the war. Friends of ours were allowed to perform them in the military hospitals and to bring joy and satisfaction to the sick with these plays during the terrible war. We have also been performing them here in Dornach for years and will try to do so again this year, so that a real picture is created of the religious content and the folk-artistic striving at the same time. The content of the performances, ladies and gentlemen, has been handed down from father to son and grandson, and as Karl Julius Schröer recorded it after hearing it, as he recorded it according to what the other performers told him. I only took the liberty of adding something that was not part of the tradition in one instance. You were able to see it yesterday in the Paradise play, and you will see it again when the Paradise play is performed, but I am firmly convinced that this piece was present, and it can only be a matter of of the spirit that lived in the folk at that time, so that a tradition that was already there at the time, that was already present, I would say, in black and white, and only got lost, has now become necessary on the stage. By staging these plays, we are trying to give a true picture of what has been revived in many areas as folklore in the 16th century from the 11th century and what has been most faithfully preserved by the poor people who were then in the process of losing their folklore, a folklore that Karl Julius Schröer wanted to preserve by recording it in dictionaries, books of spoken drama, and by passing it on to us in these Christmas plays. Many of these Christmas plays have also been collected by others, but it seems to me that these plays of the Haidbauern are the ones in which what once existed in the late Middle Ages has been preserved most purely. 1. On December 23, 1922, two performances of the Paradeis play took place at 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., but there are no transcripts are available.

274. Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays: December 24, 1922 24 Dec 1922, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner

Translated by Steiner Online Library

As we have done for many years, we would like to present a Christmas play to you this year, a folk play that takes us back to a dramatic-political time of the people, a play that has been cultivated long before the modern work of the stage and stage acting arose within Europe, in the newer Europe at all.

The plays that are performed here with us – the Adam and Eve play, which was performed yesterday ¹ and will be performed again in the next few days, and today's play, the Christ-Birth-Play, and the play that will also be performed in the next few days, the Epiphany Play – I first became acquainted with these plays almost forty years ago through my long-dead friend and teacher, Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer was a personality who, in the second half of the 19th century, made a very special contribution to the study of those German dialects that belong to the German colonists who once – probably as early as the 16th century, but certainly in the 17th century – from areas that are are not so far from us here, from southern Germany and perhaps northern Switzerland, to the east; German colonists who settled in western Hungary, in northern and southern western Hungary, and then also in northern Hungary, south of the Carpathians, and in other areas of Hungary.

Karl Julius Schröer traveled to all of these areas and studied the various dialects in the most diverse ways. It was the case that the essence of the people was already in decline even back then; other ethnic groups took in these peoples and absorbed them. They are extraordinarily interesting and beautiful books, which appeared in the guise of a dictionary, but which are nevertheless extraordinarily interesting for anyone who wants to study them. These books are written in the language that, as I said, originated in the western German regions not far from us and was then carried eastward to the Danube and the Carpathians by colonists.

Karl Julius Schröer found these Christmas plays, which we are performing here, among these people in the 1850s; he got to know them there. These Christmas plays probably originated in the 16th century or even earlier among the people when they still lived more in western Germany, as far as the Rhine. We can still see this from certain sentences in the plays themselves. When they had to emigrate, they were taken with them by the people and were performed again and again every year in the colonists' land, in Hungary. The plays listed here were performed every year by the Haidbauern, a group of farmers who live near Bratislava, in what is now Czechoslovakia, and who have long preserved the original style of their ancient folk traditions. These plays were performed there every year in the dialect that these people brought with them from the west to the east.

These folk plays have been preserved in a more genuine form among these colonists than in other areas where similar plays were also performed. For those who have separated from the tribe of their folklore and have gone abroad have truly preserved such things as a sacred treasure. Among the poor people of Oberufer and the neighboring areas on the Hungarian Danube island of Schütt, for example, it was the case that in a particularly respected family, copies of these plays were passed down from father to son and from son to grandson. The one who was allowed to preserve these plays was usually also the one who had received the oral tradition of how to play them from his ancestors. He was the so-called teacher. He might gather, with an assistant, in the fall, after the grape harvest was over, those local boys whom he considered suitable to perform the plays. Only young men were used for this; a practice we cannot imitate. These young men were entrusted with something serious during this time. Above all, they had to lead an extraordinary, moral life and had to live peacefully with the other villagers during the whole period from the grape harvest to Advent. Only then were they considered worthy to actually participate in the plays that were performed from Advent to Epiphany.

In these plays, the people expressed what was right for their views, for their aesthetic enjoyment, I would say. But at the same time, these plays were - their subjects are taken from the most important parts of biblical history, the most important for the people - an expression of the people's deepest piety. That is why, for example, during the entire period in which the plays were practiced, no music was allowed to be performed in the village that was different from the music that belonged to the plays. And it has been handed down to us that when some traveling players came to a village, they had the village musicians play in their honor. They were quite indignant: Do they think we are comedians that this music offends us? They regarded the performance of such plays as something quite serious.

Then, when Advent and later Christmas time had arrived, these plays were performed in an inn. The people, however, actually carried their pious, truly pious minds, their holy mood, I would like to say, into this inn. These plays have a genuinely folksy character in that, firstly, they are part of the broad development of European theater. You can see this in the after-effects of the images, because these are always interspersed in the action of the plays. You can see how the theater tradition from ancient Greece has continued in these simple folk plays.

But there is something else that is much, much more important. It is this: that between the most tender, genuine scenes of devotion, there are always interposed scenes of the people engaged in robust fun. This is precisely what is peculiar about these pieces, juxtaposed as they are, for example, with the figure of the Virgin Mary, who is portrayed with extraordinary delicacy and marked with wonderfully pious devotion, and the somewhat clumsy Joseph. The scene where the shepherds exchange funny jokes with one another in the field, and so on, is not particularly delicately depicted in the scene where, for example, the shepherds sacrifice to the child Jesus, in addition to the touching, pious, holy scene. But this shows us how those whose names have not been preserved, who created these plays out of genuine popular sentiment, knew the true, honest piety of the people, which never became sentimental. It was honest precisely when it did not fall into dishonest sentimentality, when laughter and rough jokes could be tolerated at the same time. And in a beautiful way, those who created such plays knew how to shape the coarse folk fun into something that, I would say, wants to reach heaven in a tender, pious worship.

As I said, Karl Julius Schröer still saw these plays performed by the farmers of the Haiddörfer in the 1950s. It was at that time, especially around Christmas time, that I heard about these folk plays from him. He spoke with tremendous inner devotion, because he loved everything that was folksy, and there was something in his words of a reflection of the consecration that the farmers associated with these plays.

He then gave me the little book in which he had followed these plays in the 1960s, and I was able to have many a conversation with him afterwards, in which he carefully pointed out the way in which the dialect was used, the way in which the language was formed in a rural, artistic way, one could say. So we were able to talk about gestures, about the whole structure of the play. It was truly a revelation of genuine folk art; at the time, it really grew quite close to my heart. And when we were able to perform such a play within the Anthroposophical Society many years ago, it was my particular endeavor to always perform these plays at Christmas time, as far as it was possible with the means used, which were available for a stage, so that an image was given of what the people had in ancient times and what they still had in certain areas until recently.

Now these plays have been largely lost. We were allowed to perform the plays even during the war. Friends of ours were allowed to perform them in the military hospitals and to bring joy and satisfaction to the sick with these plays during the terrible war. We have also been performing them here in Dornach for years and will try to do so again this year, so that a real picture is created of the religious content and the folk-artistic striving at the same time.

The content of the performances, ladies and gentlemen, has been handed down from father to son and grandson, and as Karl Julius Schröer recorded it after hearing it, as he recorded it according to what the other performers told him. I only took the liberty of adding something that was not part of the tradition in one instance. You were able to see it yesterday in the Paradise play, and you will see it again when the Paradise play is performed, but I am firmly convinced that this piece was present, and it can only be a matter of of the spirit that lived in the folk at that time, so that a tradition that was already there at the time, that was already present, I would say, in black and white, and only got lost, has now become necessary on the stage. By staging these plays, we are trying to give a true picture of what has been revived in many areas as folklore in the 16th century from the 11th century and what has been most faithfully preserved by the poor people who were then in the process of losing their folklore, a folklore that Karl Julius Schröer wanted to preserve by recording it in dictionaries, books of spoken drama, and by passing it on to us in these Christmas plays.

Many of these Christmas plays have also been collected by others, but it seems to me that these plays of the Haidbauern are the ones in which what once existed in the late Middle Ages has been preserved most purely.

1. On December 23, 1922, two performances of the Paradeis play took place at 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., but there are no transcripts are available.

165. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin Rudolf Steiner
It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared.
Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply.

165. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin
Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin
Rudolf Steiner

It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared.

Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply.

165. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin Rudolf Steiner
Especially this year as Christmas approaches, we must think of the kind of feelings that unite us with these words and their deep and universal meaning—that deep meaning for the world experienced by countless people in such a way that the word peace resounds through it, the word peace in a time when peace is utterly absent in the widest circles of humanity. How do we think of these Christmas words in this time? Nevertheless, it is a thought that, perhaps in connection with these words resounding through the world, touches us ever more deeply in the present than in other times. One thought! Nations confront one another full of animosity. Blood, so much blood saturates our earth. We have witnessed and must feel countless deaths around us in this time. Infinite suffering weaves around our inner atmosphere of feeling. Hate and antipathy race through spiritual space and can easily show how far human beings in our time still are from that love spoken about by the One whose birth is celebrated at Christmas. One thought, however, is especially predominant. We think how enemy stands against enemy, opponent against opponent, how human beings can bring death to each other and how they then can go through the same portal of death with the thought of the divine leader of light, the Christ Jesus. We think of how, all over the earth, where there is war and pain and discord, those who are otherwise in such discord can be united. Within their deepest hearts they carry their connection with Him who entered the world on the day we celebrate at Christmas. We think how through all animosity, through all antipathy, through all hate, a feeling can impress itself into all human souls everywhere in these times, can impress itself in the midst of blood and hate: the thought of the innermost link with the One, with Him who thereby united hearts through something higher than what is able to separate human beings on earth. And so it is nevertheless a thought of infinite greatness, a thought of infinite depth of feeling, this thought of the Christ Jesus who harmonizes human beings no matter what their discord might be, no matter what goes on in the world. If we take hold of the thought in this way, we will want to grasp it even more intensely, especially in our time. Then we will have an intimation of how strongly this thought is connected with what must become great and strong and powerful within human evolution. If this were to happen, much that must still be fought for in such a bloody way at this time could be achieved in another way by human hearts, by human soul. That He makes us strong, that He strengthens us, that He teaches us all over the earth really to feel in the truest sense of the word the Christmas verse, transcending everything that separates us: those who truly feel themselves connected with the Christ Jesus must promise this to themselves on Christmas night again and again. There is a tradition within the history of Christianity that arose repeatedly in later times and was a custom in certain Christian regions over many centuries. Already in far distant times in various regions, mostly emerging from Christian churches, there were presentations for believers of the mystery of Christmas night. Especially in these most ancient times, the presentation of the mystery of Christmas night began with a reading, yes, at times even with a presentation of the story of Creation, the story of Creation as it is presented at the beginning of the Bible. Especially around the time of Christmas it was described how, out of the depths of the cosmos, the universal Word resounded, how out of the universal Word creation arose gradually, bit by bit. It was described how Lucifer approached the human being and how human beings thereby began earthly existence in a different way from what would have been the case had Lucifer not approached, in a way different from what was originally destined. The entire story of the temptation of Adam, and Eve was presented, and then it was shown how the human being was integrated, as if were, into ancient, pre-testamental history. Only as time went on do we find what was presented in more or less detail in the various plays that developed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in Central Europe, of which we have seen a small example just now. At the Christmas festival, an infinitely great thought originally drew together the beginning of the Old Testament with the mysterious story of the Mystery of Golgotha. Very little indeed has remained of what it was from this thought that drew together the two sacred stories. Only a little of this insight has remained, one contemporary example being our calendar, in which the day before Christmas Eve is called the day of Adam and Eve. This has its origin in the same thought. In more ancient times, however, there were those with deeper thoughts, with deeper feelings, a deeper knowledge received from their teachers who taught them how they were to grasp the mystery of Christmas and the mystery of Golgotha. For them a great, encompassing symbolic thought was always being presented: the thought of the origin of the Cross. The God who is presented to us in the Old Testament gives one commandment to the human being, represented by Adam and Eve: “You may eat from all the fruits of the garden; only the fruits that grow on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil must you avoid, because they who have eaten of that fruit would be cast out of the original scene of their existence.” The tree, however—which was now represented in the most varied ways—came by some means into the sequence of generations that were the original generations from which the bodily sheath of the Christ Jesus proceeded. This came about in the following way (as it was presented in certain periods of time): when Adam, the sinful man was buried, this tree again grew out of his grave and was thus removed from Paradise. In this story we see the thought suggested that Adam rests in the grave, the human being who went through sin, the human being who was misguided by Lucifer; he rests in the grave and he unites himself with the body of the earth; but out of his grave the tree grows, the tree that can now grow out of the earth with which Adam's body has been united. The wood of this tree passes over to the generations to which Abraham also belongs, to which David belongs. And out of the wood of this tree, which actually stood in Paradise, which then grew again out of Adam's grave, out of the wood of this tree, the Cross was made on which Christ Jesus was crucified. This is the thought that was made clear again and again by the teachers of those who were to understand the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha out of deeper foundations. There is a deep meaning in the fact that in ancient times deep thoughts came to expression in such pictures, and this meaning holds good for the present as well. It will become clear to us that it still holds true for today. We have also acquainted ourselves with the thought of the Mystery of Golgotha that says to us; the Being who has lived on earth through the body of Jesus poured out over the earth what He could bring to the earth, He poured it into the aura of the earth. What the Christ brought into the earth has since then become united with the entire corporeality of the earth. The earth has become something different since the Mystery of Golgotha. What Christ brought out of heavenly heights down to the earth is living in the earth aura. If we consider this spiritually in connection with the ancient picture of the tree, this picture shows us the entire relationship from a higher point of view. The Luciferic principle entered the human being when the human being made his beginning on earth. The human being, as he is now in his union with the Luciferic principle, belongs to the earth, indeed he forms a part of the earth. And when we lay his body into the earth, this body is not rust as anatomy sees it; this body is at the same time the outer mold of what the human being is in his inner being within the earthly realm. It can then also be clear out of spiritual science that it is not just what goes through the portal of death into the spiritual world that belongs to the being of man; rather it becomes clear that the human being through all his activity, through all his deeds, is united with the earth. He is really united with it in the same way as those happenings that the geologist, the mineralogist, the zoologist, etc., find connected with the earth. It is only when the human being goes through the portal of death that one could say that there is a termination for the human individuality of that which unites him to the earth. Our outer form, however, which we surrender in some way to the earth, enters the body of the earth. It carries in itself the stamp of what the earth has become through the fact that Lucifer entered into earthly evolution. What the human being achieves on the earth carries the Luciferic principle; the human being brings this Luciferic principle into the aura of the earth. It is not only what was originally the intention of the human being that arises, that blossoms out of human deeds, out of the activities of human beings; out of human deeds there arises something that has the Luciferic element mixed in with it. This then is in the aura of the earth. And when we now look upon the tree growing out of the grave of the human being Adam, who was led astray by Lucifer, if we look at the tree that has become something different through the Luciferic temptation—this tree that was originally the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—we see everything that the human being brought about by the fact that he left his original state of existence, that he became something different through, the Luciferic temptation and that something was thereby brought into earthly evolution that had not previously been intended. We see the tree grow out of what forms the physical body for the earth, which was stamped in its earthly form by that which permits the human being to appear on the earth in a lower sphere than he would have if he had not gone through the Luciferic temptation. Something grows out of man's entire earthly existence that has come into humanity's evolution through the Luciferic misguidance, through the temptation. When we seek knowledge, we seek it in a different way than was originally predestined. This makes it appear that something different grows out of our earthly deeds from what would have been the case in accordance with the gods' original intention. We form an earthly existence that is not as the gods originally intended for us; we mix something else into it, and we must form very definite pictures of this if we wish to understand it. Definite mental images are required if we wish to understand, to understand properly. We must say to ourselves: I am placed into earthly evolution. What I give to earthly evolution through my deeds bears fruit; it bears the fruit of knowledge that has become muse by the fact that I have gained the knowledge of good and evil on the earth. This knowledge lives in the evolution of the earth, this knowledge is there. As I look at this knowledge, however, it becomes something different for me, something that is different from what it originally should have been. It becomes something that I must change if the goal and task of the earth are to be achieved, I see growing out of my earthly deeds something that must become different. The tree grows forth, the tree that becomes the Cross of earthly existence, the tree that becomes something to which the human being must gain a new relationship. For the old relationship allows this tree to grow. The tree of the Cross, of that Cross which grows out of the Luciferically colored evolution of the earth, grows out of Adam's grave, out of the humanity that Adam has become since the temptation. The Tree of Knowledge must become the trunk of the Cross, because the human being must unite himself anew with the properly understood Tree of Knowledge as it is now in order to achieve the goal and task of the earth. Let us ask ourselves—and here we touch on a significant mystery of spiritual science—what is really the situation with the members we have come to know as the members of human nature? We know to begin with that the highest member of human nature is the “I.” We learn to express our “I” at a definite moment in childhood. We gain a relationship to this “I” at the point to which we have memories in later life. We know from the most varied spiritual scientific considerations that until this point in time the “I” itself was active in forming and structuring us. This remains the case until the point at which we begin to have a relationship, a conscious relationship, to our “I.” In the child, this “I” is there also, but it works within, its first task is to form our body. To begin with it creates the super-sensible forces in the spiritual world. When we have gone through conception and birth it still works creatively on our body for a period of time that lasts a few years, until we have our body as a tool so that we can consciously comprehend our self as an “I.” A deep mystery is connected with this entry of the “I” into the human bodily nature. When we meet a person we ask him, “How old are you?” He gives his age as the years that have passed since his birth. As has been said, we touch here on a certain mystery of spiritual science that will become more and more clear as time passes. Today, however, I will only touch on it, will only share it with you. What a person gives as his age at a definite time of his life is connected with his physical body. He says nothing other than that his physical body has been developing for so-and-so long since his birth. The “I” does not go along with this development of the physical body. The “I” stays there, This is a difficult mystery to grasp, that the “I” stays at the point of time to which we can recollect, the point at which we remember ourselves. It does not change with the body, it stays there. For just this reason we always have it in front of us so that, as we look, it can mirror our experiences for us. The “I” does not take part in our earthly journey. Only when we have gone through the portal of death must we take the path that we call Kamaloca backward again to our birth in order to re encounter our “I” and then to take it along on our further journey. The “I” remains behind. The body pushes itself forward in years while the “I” remains behind, the “I” stays there. This is difficult to comprehend because one cannot imagine that something remains standing in time while time keeps moving. Nevertheless this is so, the “I” stays there, and it remains there because the “I” does not actually unite itself with what approaches the human being from earthly existence. It remains united with those forces we call ours in the spiritual world. The “I” remains there, the “I” fundamentally remains in the form in which it has been conferred on us, as we know, by the Spirits of Form. This “I” is retained in the spiritual world. It must be held in the spiritual world, for otherwise we would never be able to achieve again the earth's original goal and aim as human beings during our earthly evolution. What the human being underwent here on earth because of his Adam nature, you could say, of which he takes an impress into the grave when he dies as Adam—this clings to the physical body, etheric body, and astral body, this comes from these. The “I” waits, waits with everything that is in it, waits the entire time undergone by the human being on the earth. It looks only toward the further development of the human being as he repeats it for himself when he has gone through the portal of death and follows this path in reverse. This means that we remain with our “I” back in the spiritual world (this is meant in a specific sense). Humanity ought to become conscious of this fact. And humanity is only able to become conscious of this fact because at a certain time the Christ descended out of those worlds to which the human being belongs, out of the spiritual worlds. In the body of Jesus He prepared for Himself, in the way we know, in a twofold way, what was to serve Him as body on the earth. If we understand ourselves correctly, we always look back through our entire earthly life, back to our childhood. Our spiritual element has remained back in our childhood. We always look toward this if we wish to understand things correctly. And humanity ought to be instructed to look toward what the spirit out of the heights can say: “Let the little children come to me.” Not adults, who are connected with the earth, but rather the little children. In having been given the festival of Christmas in addition to the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity ought to be instructed in this. Otherwise the Mystery of Golgotha would only need to have been conferred on humanity in relation to the last three years of Christ's life, when Christ was in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christmas festival shows how Christ prepared the human body for himself during childhood. This is what should lie at the basis of the Christmas experience: to know how the human being has actually always remained connected with what is approaching now through what remained behind during growth, remaining in the heavenly heights. In the form of the child, the human being should be reminded of the human-divine element from which he has distanced himself on descending to the earth but that now has returned to him. The human being ought to be reminded of this childlike element in him. He ought to be reminded of Him who brought back the childlike element to him again. Though it was not easy, one can see the force that works so wonderfully to carry this precisely in the way in which the festival of the World Child, the Christmas festival, was developed in areas of Central Europe. What we have seen today was only a small example of the Christmas plays, of which there are many. It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared. These plays disappeared even in rural areas in approximately the middle of the eighteenth century, but it is wonderful to see how some remained alive. A man about whom I have spoken, Karl Julius Schröer, collected such Christmas plays in the area of western Hungary in the 1850's. He searched for them in the area around Pressburg, and then further beyond Pressburg into Hungary. Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply. These Christmas plays, handwritten, remained in the hands of certain families in the villages and were treasured as something especially sacred. When October came around, people began thinking about having to perform these plays during the Christmas season for the people of the village. Then the best behaved boys and girls were selected, and they began to prepare themselves: they were not permitted to drink wine or any alcoholic beverages, nor were they permitted—which could well happen in such places, as we know—to be rowdy and rambunctious on Sundays, and they were not permitted any other transgressions. They really had to “lead a holy life,” as is said. Thus people were aware that a certain moral mood of the soul had to be assumed by those who were to devote themselves to the performance of such plays during the Christmas season. Such plays were not to be performed out of ordinary worldliness. They were performed with all the naïveté with which the peasants could perform something like that. And yet the whole performance was permeated with deepest seriousness, with infinite seriousness. The plays gathered by Karl Julius Schröer and others in the most varied areas have in common this deep seriousness, the seriousness with which one approached the Christmas mystery. But this was not always the case. We only need to go back just a few centuries to find something different, to encounter something most curious. In looking at how these Christmas plays arose and gradually developed in areas of Central Europe, we are able to see especially clearly how overwhelmingly the Christmas thought was active. But this thought was not immediately taken up in the way I have just described it, approached with a certain kind of sacred modesty, with great seriousness and awareness of the significance of the event that lived in the feeling. No indeed! In many areas it began by simply placing a manger in some kind of side altar in this or that church. (This was still the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it goes back to still earlier times.) A manger was placed there, and therefore a stall, in which were placed an ox and an ass, as well as the Child and two dolls representing Joseph and Mary. At first they used a very naive sculptural technique, but then it was desired to bring more life to the figures. This came first from the side of the clergy. Thus priests dressed themselves up, one as Joseph, the other as Mary, and they then represented these figures. They played these roles instead of using the dolls. In the earliest times they even presented the scene in Latin, because in the old churches, if the performance was to present a deep meaning it was considered important that those who saw or listened understand as little as possible, that they only see the outer mimicry. After some time this was no longer tolerated. The people also wanted to understand what was performed in front of them. Gradually there was a transition to presenting portions of it in the local language spoken in those regions. And finally the people awoke to a feeling of wanting to participate, to experience it themselves. Yet it remained foreign to them, quite foreign. We need only consider that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example, familiarity with these holy mysteries of Christmas night, for example, did not exist. Today we take these things for granted, but at that time it was not there. You have to keep in mind that year in and year out people heard the mass, also hearing it at Christmas (held at midnight during the holy night), but that they did not hear the Bible—the Bible was only there for the priest to read. Thus they knew only single fragments of the sacred story. The initial attempts by the priests to present these things dramatically were really in order to acquaint the people with what had once taken place. In this way the people learned to know what was written in the Bible. I must say something now that I beg you not to misunderstand. It can be mentioned because it corresponds to purely historical truth. Some kind of mystery mood or something similar did not immediately emanate from these presentations once people wanted to participate in the Christmas plays. This is not how it was. Rather the longing to take part in what was presented to them, to be more active participants, was what brought people closer to the situation. And finally they had to be permitted to participate to some extent; things had to be made more comprehensible to the people. By making it more comprehensible, things moved forward step by step. For example, people did not understand initially that in the manger lay the Child. They had never seen that, they had never seen a child in a manger. Certainly earlier, when they were not permitted to understand anything, they just accepted it, but new that they wanted to participate it needed to be made completely comprehensible to them. At that time only a rocking cradle was placed in front of them, and people began to take part by walking by the cradle, each person rocking the Child in it for a little while. Gradually similar moments of participation developed. There were even regions where first a person approached the manger very seriously and then, on finding the Child there, incredible noise erupted and everyone screamed and pointed and danced, indicating the pleasure they now experienced because the Child had been born. This was taken up entirely in a mood emanating from the longing to participate themselves, the longing to experience a story. In the story, however, there was such grandness, something so powerful, that out of this completely profane mood—for it was initially a profane mood—there developed gradually, bit by bit, the holy mood about which I have just been speaking. The situation itself poured its holiness out over a reception that initially could not have been called holy. Especially in the Middle Ages, the holy story of Christmas first had to conquer the people. And the story conquered them to such an extent that while they were performing their plays they wanted to prepare themselves morally m such an intensive way. What was it that conquered human feelings, the human soul? It was the tow of the Child, the view of what has remained holy in the human being while the three remaining bodies unite themselves with earthly development. Although in certain regions and during certain periods the story of Bethlehem took on grotesque forms, it was inherent in human nature to develop this holy view toward the nature of the Child, which is connected with what entered into Christian evolution from the very beginning: the consciousness of how what remains behind in the human being when he begins his earthly development must enter into a new bond with that which united itself with earthly man. He gives over to the earth the wood out of which the Cross must be made, through which he establishes a new bond. In older times of Christian development in Central Europe, only the Easter thought was present among the people. Only in the way in which I have described it has the Christmas thought gradually been added. What we find written in the Heliand, or similar works, was recorded by individual poets, but it did not become popular. The popular aspects of Christmas arose in the way I have just described, which shows in a truly grand way how the thought of the bond with the childlike, with the pure, truly childlike element that appeared in a new form in the Jesus Child, has conquered the human being. If we bring the power of this thought together with the fact that this thought can live in souls so as to unite all people (and to begin with it is the only thought in our earthly existence that can do so), we come to the true Christ thought. The Christ thought therefore becomes great and must gradually become stronger in us if the further evolution of the earth is to take place in the right way. Just consider how far removed the human being in present earthly existence still is from what is concealed in the depths of the Christ thought. A book has just recently been published—perhaps you have read it—written by Ernst Haeckel, World War Thoughts About Life, Death, and Infinity and Religion. A book by Ernst Haeckel is certainly one that proceeds from the most serious search for truth. This book by Ernst Haeckel points to what is now taking place on the earth, how people are at war with one another, how they hate one another, how countless deaths result every day. Haeckel mentions all these thoughts that obtrude upon people so painfully. Certainly he always mentions these thoughts with the background of looking at the world as he sees it from his standpoint. We know about his standpoint, having often spoken about it and about how we can recognize in Haeckel one of the greatest scientists. This standpoint leads also to other things, but it leads to something that can be observed in the newer phases of Haeckel's development. Haeckel offers some thoughts about the World War. He also remarks on how much blood is flowing now, how many deaths surround us, and he asks himself, “Can the thoughts of religion survive next to these events?” As Haeckel asks it, “Can one believe that there is in any way a wisdom-filled providence, a beneficent God who rules the world, when every day one sees that by mere chance,” so he says, “so many people's lives are ended, that they die by no cause that can be proven to be related in any way to some kind of wise world rulership? Instead, by chance” he says, “this one or that one is struck by a bullet, suffering either death or injury. In the face of all these events, do thoughts of wisdom, thoughts of divine providence, have any meaning? Must not just such events as these prove that the human being must stay in one place, that he is nothing but what the outer, materialistically conceived history of evolution shows us, and that fundamentally everything in earthly existence is ruled not by divine providence but by chance? Is it possible in the face of all these events to have another religious thought” says Haeckel, “to do something other than resign oneself, saying that a person simply surrenders his body and dissipates into the cosmos?” One can ask further, however—Haeckel no longer asks this question—“If this cosmos is nothing but the play of atoms, does human life really provide a meaning for earthly existence?” As I said, Haeckel does not ask this question anymore, but he does give an answer in his Christmas book: “Precisely events such as those that touch us so painfully now, just such events show that there is no justification for believing in any kind of beneficent providence or wise guidance of the world or anything like it; it is impossible now to maintain that anything like this weaves through and guides the world. Therefore resignation, seeing one's own way, is all there is.” Haeckel's book is also a Christmas book! It is a Christmas book meant very sincerely and honestly. But this book is based on a significant prejudice. It rests on the prejudice that, it is not permissible to seek in a spiritual way for the earth's meaning, that humanity is prohibited from looking for a meaning of the earth in a spiritual way. If it is only the outer course of events that is considered, one does not see this meaning. This is what happens to Haeckel. Then the situation must remain with the recognition that this life has no meaning. This is what Haeckel means. Looking for meaning is not permitted! But is it not so that another might come and say something further: that if we look only at these contemporary events externally, pointing out that countless bullets are destroying human lives, if we look only at these events and no meaning results, then precisely because of this we must seek for this meaning in a deeper way. It is precisely events such as these that show us we cannot amply look for and believe in meaning by looking just at what is going on now on the earth—by seeing only that these human souls vanish like their bodily natures. Instead we must look at what they are now beginning as they pass through the portal of death. In short, another person could come and say that precisely because no meaning can be found in the outer events, the meaning must be looked for outside the outer, the meaning must be looked for in the super-sensible. Is this any different from looking at the same matter in a completely different realm? For one who thinks the way Haeckel thinks today, Haeckel's science can become a refusal to recognize any meaning in earthly existence. It can happen that a person wants to prove out of the events that are taking place so painfully today that earthly life as such has no meaning. But, if one takes hold of the problem in our way—we have done this frequently—precisely this same science takes as its starting point the deep and great meaning that can be unraveled by us in world phenomena. For this to happen, however, something spiritual must be active in the world; we must be able to unite ourselves with the spiritual, It is impossible for people to find a meaning for the earth, a real meaning, because our educated people do not yet understand that it is necessary to permit the power to work upon them that once so wonderfully conquered hearts, souls: the power that arose on looking at the Christmas mystery, from which a profane comprehension evolved into a sacred comprehension. Scholars are unable to grasp this yet; they cannot yet unite the Christ impulse with what they see in the outer world, and thus it is impossible for them to find a meaning for the earth. Thus one must say that science, for all its great progress of which people are so proud today—and justifiably so - is not in a position out of itself to lead to a view that satisfies the human being. As it goes its way, it can lead in the same way either to meaninglessness or to the meaning of the earth, just as in any other domain. Consider this outer science so proudly developed in the last few centuries, especially from the nineteenth century until today, with all its wonderful laws. Consider everything that surrounds us today. It has been brought forth by this science. We no longer burn light at night in the same way that Goethe burned his. We burn light in a completely different way, and we illuminate our rooms in a completely different way. Consider everything that lives in our souls today out of our science; it has arisen through the great progress of science, of which humanity is justifiably proud. What is the effect of this same science? It is a blessing if man develops it as such. But today, especially since it is such a complete science, it produces indomitable instruments of death. Its progress serves destruction just as well as construction. Just as the science acknowledged by Haeckel can lead to either meaning or meaninglessness, so the science that can achieve such great things can serve either construction or destruction. Arid if the main thing is this science, science will bring forth evermore horrible and frightful works of destruction out of the same source that leads to constructive ends. Science does not directly have an impulse to bring humanity forward. If only this were seen once, this science would be evaluated in the right way! Only then would it be known that something else must be an integral part of humanity's evolution than what the human being can achieve through this science. For what is this science, after all? In reality it is nothing but the tree that grows out of the grave of Adam. And the time is fast approaching when people will recognize that this science is the tree growing out of Adam's grave. And the time will come when people will recognize that this tree must become the wood that is the Cross of humanity. This wood can lead to a blessing only if that which unites in the right way with what lies beyond death, but lives already here in the human being, is crucified on the Cross: that which we behold on the holy Christmas night if we experience it in the right way, in its true mystery, that which can fee presented in a childlike way but that bears the highest mysteries. Isn't it actually wonderful that in the simplest way it can be said to the people: something entered which is active through human life on earth, something that actually may not go beyond childhood. It is related to what the human being belongs to as a super-sensible being. Isn't it wonderful that this super-sensible-invisible element, in the most eminent sense, can come so near to human souls in such a simple picture? Simple human souls! Yes, those who are educated must also undertake the path taken by those simple human souls. There was a time when the Child was not presented in the manger. The Child in the manger was not presented, but instead the Child sleeping on the Cross was presented. The Child sleeping on the Cross! A wonderfully profound picture, bringing the entire thought to expression that I have wanted to let arise before your souls today. And is it not basically very simple to express this thought? Yes, it is. Indeed, let us look once for the origin of those impulses that oppose each other in the world today in such a horrible way. Where do these impulses originate? Where does everything originate that makes the life of humanity so difficult today? Where is the origin of all this? It lies in everything we become in the world only after that point of time at which we can recollect ourselves. If we go back beyond this point of time, if we go back to the point in time at which we are called the “little children who are able to enter the kingdom of heaven”—this is not where it originates. At that point nothing of what today is in battle and dispute resides in human souls. The thought can be expressed this simply, but spiritually we must consider the fact that there is something so original in the human soul that it goes beyond all human strife, beyond all human disharmony. We have often spoken of the ancient mysteries that wanted to awaken in human nature that which permits the human being to look up into the super-sensible. And we have spoken of the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, perceptible for all human beings on the stage of history, has presented the super-sensible mystery. There is something that fundamentally unites us with the true Christ thought. We have this by virtue of the fact that we are able to have moments in our life (I am now speaking directly, not in a pictorial way) in which, despite everything we are in the outer world, we can bring alive in us what we received as a child. We can do this by going backward, feeling ourselves back at the child's standpoint? we can do this by looking toward the human being as he develops between birth and death, so that we are able to sense within us what we received as a child. In the public lecture about Johann Gottlieb Fichte which I gave last Thursday, I could have added something, but at the time it would not have been understood. I could have said something that would have clarified a great deal that lives in this devout man in such a peculiar way. I would have spoken about why he actually developed the very particular way he did, and I would have had to say that this was because, more than other people, he retained the childlike quality in himself despite growing old. He retained more of the childlike quality in himself than other people do. Such people actually grow less old. It is really true that what existed in childhood remains more in such people than in others. This is generally the secret of many great human beings, that right into their oldest age they are able to remain children in a certain way; even when they die, they die as children, though this must be expressed only partially, since one must be connected with life. The Christmas mystery thus speaks to what lives in us as a childlike quality, it speaks with a view to the divine Child who was selected to take up the Christ, it speaks with a view to the one who was already overshadowed by the Christ, who went through the Mystery of Golgotha in reality to heal the earth. Let us become conscious of the fact that when we surrender the imprint of our higher self, when we surrender our physical body to the earth, it is not a merely physical process. Something spiritual is also taking place. But this spiritual aspect takes place in the right way only by virtue of the fact that the Christ being has streamed into the earth aura, the Christ being who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. We cannot see the earth in its completeness if we do not see that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ has been united with the earth. We can bypass the Christ, just as we can bypass everything super-sensible, if we feel ourselves constituted only of earthly matter and only able to relate to it. But if the earth is to have a real and true meaning for us, we can not bypass Christ. For this reason everything depends on our being able to awaken in ourselves something that will open the view into the spiritual world. Let us make our Christmas festival into something that it must be especially for us. Let us make it into a festival that serves not only the past but the future, the future that little by little is to bring to birth the spiritual life for all humanity. We want to unite ourselves with the prophetic feeling, the prophetic intimation, that such a birth of the spiritual life must be brought to humanity, that presiding over humanity's future a great holy night must be active, coming to birth out of what gives meaning to the earth from human thoughts. The earth received this meaning objectively through the fact that the Christ being united Himself with the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha. In the holy night let us think of how, out of the depths of darkness, light must enter human evolution, the light of spiritual life. The old light of spiritual life that was there before the Mystery of Golgotha had to pass away, gradually it had to be extinguished. The light must arise again, must be reborn after the Mystery of Golgotha through the consciousness in the human soul, that this human soul is connected with what Christ became for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, If there are more and more people who come to know how to conceive of Christmas in such a spiritual scientific sense, this Christmas night will develop a force in human hearts and human souls that will have its meaning in all times. It will have meaning in times in which people surrender themselves to feelings of joy but also in times in which people have to surrender themselves to the feelings of pain that must penetrate us today when we think of the great misery of our tune. Since looking up to the spiritual gives meaning to the earth, I would like to share with you today the words of one who expressed this so beautifully: What gave my eye this force, That all misshapen forms have dissolved. That the nights become like brilliant suns. Disorder becomes order, decay life? What intricate weaving through time, through space, Guides me surely to the eternal well Of the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and of all delight. And in destroying immerses all my striving? It is this: into Urania's eye, the deep, Itself clear, blue, still, pure Lightflame, I myself have quietly gazed. Since then, this eye rests in my depths And is in my being—the eternal One, Lives in my life, sees in my seeing. And in a second small poem: Nothing is but God, and God is nothing but life, You know it, you and I know it together, But how would knowing be there If it were not knowing of God's life? “How gladly would I surrender myself to this, Yet where do I find it? Somehow it flows Into knowing, then transforms itself into seeming, Mingling with it, surrounded by its sheaths.” Quite dearly the sheath rises up before you, It is your I, what is destructible dies, And henceforth only God lives in your striving. See through what survives this striving, Then the sheath becomes visible to you as sheath. And unveiled you see divine life. Certainly people do not always know what they ought to do with those who point to perceiving the spiritual that gives meaning to the earth. It is not only materialists who do not know what to do. Others who believe they are not materialists because they are always saying, “God! God! God!” or “Lord! Lord! Lord!” often do not know what to make of these individuals who guide us to the spiritual. For what can one do with a person who says. “There is nothing but God! Everything is God! Everywhere, everywhere is God!” He was seeking for God in everything, the one who said: See through what survives this striving, Then the sheath becomes visible to you as sheath And unveiled, you see divine life! An individual who wants to see divine life everywhere could be accused of not allowing the world to exist, of denying the existence of the world. Though one could call him a world-denier, his contemporaries called him a denier of God, and they therefore chased him away from the colleges and universities. The words I have read to you are those of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If the Mystery of Golgotha continues to live on in the human soul through earthly existence—amid what is connected with this Mystery of Golgotha in the Christmas mystery—it can serve as an impulse resounding in the soul. Fichte is a perfect example of how, when this is the case, a path is opened on which we can find the consciousness in which our own “I” flows together with the earth “I”—for this earth “I” is the Christ. Through this, we develop something in the human being that must become greater and greater if the earth is to move toward the development for which it was destined from the beginning. Therefore we especially wish, out of the spirit of our spiritual knowledge renewed in the sense it has been today, to let the Christmas thought become an impulse in us. By looking up to this Christmas thought, we wish to attempt to see from what surrounds us not the meaninglessness of earthly evolution; rather, in the suffering and pain, in the strife and hate, we hope to see something that ultimately helps humanity forward, something that really brings humanity a bit forward. It is not so important to look for causes, which anyway are so easily concealed in partisan strife. It is much more important for what happens today to focus on the possible effects, those effects that we must picture to ourselves as healing, as bringing healing for humanity. The nations and people who are in a position to shape something that can be healing for humanity of the future out of what is able to sprout from the blood-drenched soil will be led to the right approach. What can be healing for humanity, however, can develop only if people find the way into the spiritual worlds, if people do not forget that there was not only one Christmas but that there must be an everlasting Christmas, an everlasting coming-to-birth of the divine- spiritual in the physical, earthly human being. Especially today we wish to enclose the sacredness of this thought in our souls, we wish to hold it for the time surrounding Christmas, which can he a symbol for the evolution of light also in its outer course. In these days, at this time of year, darkness, earth darkness, will be here to the greatest degree possible on earth. When the earth lives in this deepest outer darkness, however, we know that the earth soul experiences her light, beginning to awaken to the highest degree. The time of Christmas, then, is connected with the time of spiritual awakening. And with this time of spiritual awakening, the memory of the spiritual awakening for earthly evolution through the Christ Jesus shall be united. We therefore have the institution of the Christmas festival especially at this time. Let us unite the Christmas thought with our soul in. this cosmic, and at the same time earthly, moral sense. Then, reinforced and strengthened with this Christmas thought as best as we can, let us look upon everything surrounding us to want what is right for the progress of events, also wanting what is appropriate in the development of deeds of the present time.

165. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin
Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin
Rudolf Steiner

Especially this year as Christmas approaches, we must think of the kind of feelings that unite us with these words and their deep and universal meaning—that deep meaning for the world experienced by countless people in such a way that the word peace resounds through it, the word peace in a time when peace is utterly absent in the widest circles of humanity. How do we think of these Christmas words in this time?

Nevertheless, it is a thought that, perhaps in connection with these words resounding through the world, touches us ever more deeply in the present than in other times. One thought! Nations confront one another full of animosity. Blood, so much blood saturates our earth. We have witnessed and must feel countless deaths around us in this time. Infinite suffering weaves around our inner atmosphere of feeling. Hate and antipathy race through spiritual space and can easily show how far human beings in our time still are from that love spoken about by the One whose birth is celebrated at Christmas. One thought, however, is especially predominant. We think how enemy stands against enemy, opponent against opponent, how human beings can bring death to each other and how they then can go through the same portal of death with the thought of the divine leader of light, the Christ Jesus. We think of how, all over the earth, where there is war and pain and discord, those who are otherwise in such discord can be united. Within their deepest hearts they carry their connection with Him who entered the world on the day we celebrate at Christmas.

We think how through all animosity, through all antipathy, through all hate, a feeling can impress itself into all human souls everywhere in these times, can impress itself in the midst of blood and hate: the thought of the innermost link with the One, with Him who thereby united hearts through something higher than what is able to separate human beings on earth. And so it is nevertheless a thought of infinite greatness, a thought of infinite depth of feeling, this thought of the Christ Jesus who harmonizes human beings no matter what their discord might be, no matter what goes on in the world.

If we take hold of the thought in this way, we will want to grasp it even more intensely, especially in our time. Then we will have an intimation of how strongly this thought is connected with what must become great and strong and powerful within human evolution. If this were to happen, much that must still be fought for in such a bloody way at this time could be achieved in another way by human hearts, by human soul.

That He makes us strong, that He strengthens us, that He teaches us all over the earth really to feel in the truest sense of the word the Christmas verse, transcending everything that separates us: those who truly feel themselves connected with the Christ Jesus must promise this to themselves on Christmas night again and again.

There is a tradition within the history of Christianity that arose repeatedly in later times and was a custom in certain Christian regions over many centuries. Already in far distant times in various regions, mostly emerging from Christian churches, there were presentations for believers of the mystery of Christmas night. Especially in these most ancient times, the presentation of the mystery of Christmas night began with a reading, yes, at times even with a presentation of the story of Creation, the story of Creation as it is presented at the beginning of the Bible. Especially around the time of Christmas it was described how, out of the depths of the cosmos, the universal Word resounded, how out of the universal Word creation arose gradually, bit by bit. It was described how Lucifer approached the human being and how human beings thereby began earthly existence in a different way from what would have been the case had Lucifer not approached, in a way different from what was originally destined. The entire story of the temptation of Adam, and Eve was presented, and then it was shown how the human being was integrated, as if were, into ancient, pre-testamental history.

Only as time went on do we find what was presented in more or less detail in the various plays that developed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in Central Europe, of which we have seen a small example just now.

At the Christmas festival, an infinitely great thought originally drew together the beginning of the Old Testament with the mysterious story of the Mystery of Golgotha. Very little indeed has remained of what it was from this thought that drew together the two sacred stories. Only a little of this insight has remained, one contemporary example being our calendar, in which the day before Christmas Eve is called the day of Adam and Eve. This has its origin in the same thought. In more ancient times, however, there were those with deeper thoughts, with deeper feelings, a deeper knowledge received from their teachers who taught them how they were to grasp the mystery of Christmas and the mystery of Golgotha. For them a great, encompassing symbolic thought was always being presented: the thought of the origin of the Cross.

The God who is presented to us in the Old Testament gives one commandment to the human being, represented by Adam and Eve: “You may eat from all the fruits of the garden; only the fruits that grow on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil must you avoid, because they who have eaten of that fruit would be cast out of the original scene of their existence.”

The tree, however—which was now represented in the most varied ways—came by some means into the sequence of generations that were the original generations from which the bodily sheath of the Christ Jesus proceeded. This came about in the following way (as it was presented in certain periods of time): when Adam, the sinful man was buried, this tree again grew out of his grave and was thus removed from Paradise. In this story we see the thought suggested that Adam rests in the grave, the human being who went through sin, the human being who was misguided by Lucifer; he rests in the grave and he unites himself with the body of the earth; but out of his grave the tree grows, the tree that can now grow out of the earth with which Adam's body has been united.

The wood of this tree passes over to the generations to which Abraham also belongs, to which David belongs. And out of the wood of this tree, which actually stood in Paradise, which then grew again out of Adam's grave, out of the wood of this tree, the Cross was made on which Christ Jesus was crucified.

This is the thought that was made clear again and again by the teachers of those who were to understand the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha out of deeper foundations. There is a deep meaning in the fact that in ancient times deep thoughts came to expression in such pictures, and this meaning holds good for the present as well. It will become clear to us that it still holds true for today.

We have also acquainted ourselves with the thought of the Mystery of Golgotha that says to us; the Being who has lived on earth through the body of Jesus poured out over the earth what He could bring to the earth, He poured it into the aura of the earth. What the Christ brought into the earth has since then become united with the entire corporeality of the earth. The earth has become something different since the Mystery of Golgotha. What Christ brought out of heavenly heights down to the earth is living in the earth aura.

If we consider this spiritually in connection with the ancient picture of the tree, this picture shows us the entire relationship from a higher point of view. The Luciferic principle entered the human being when the human being made his beginning on earth. The human being, as he is now in his union with the Luciferic principle, belongs to the earth, indeed he forms a part of the earth. And when we lay his body into the earth, this body is not rust as anatomy sees it; this body is at the same time the outer mold of what the human being is in his inner being within the earthly realm. It can then also be clear out of spiritual science that it is not just what goes through the portal of death into the spiritual world that belongs to the being of man; rather it becomes clear that the human being through all his activity, through all his deeds, is united with the earth. He is really united with it in the same way as those happenings that the geologist, the mineralogist, the zoologist, etc., find connected with the earth.

It is only when the human being goes through the portal of death that one could say that there is a termination for the human individuality of that which unites him to the earth. Our outer form, however, which we surrender in some way to the earth, enters the body of the earth. It carries in itself the stamp of what the earth has become through the fact that Lucifer entered into earthly evolution. What the human being achieves on the earth carries the Luciferic principle; the human being brings this Luciferic principle into the aura of the earth. It is not only what was originally the intention of the human being that arises, that blossoms out of human deeds, out of the activities of human beings; out of human deeds there arises something that has the Luciferic element mixed in with it. This then is in the aura of the earth. And when we now look upon the tree growing out of the grave of the human being Adam, who was led astray by Lucifer, if we look at the tree that has become something different through the Luciferic temptation—this tree that was originally the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—we see everything that the human being brought about by the fact that he left his original state of existence, that he became something different through, the Luciferic temptation and that something was thereby brought into earthly evolution that had not previously been intended.

We see the tree grow out of what forms the physical body for the earth, which was stamped in its earthly form by that which permits the human being to appear on the earth in a lower sphere than he would have if he had not gone through the Luciferic temptation. Something grows out of man's entire earthly existence that has come into humanity's evolution through the Luciferic misguidance, through the temptation. When we seek knowledge, we seek it in a different way than was originally predestined. This makes it appear that something different grows out of our earthly deeds from what would have been the case in accordance with the gods' original intention. We form an earthly existence that is not as the gods originally intended for us; we mix something else into it, and we must form very definite pictures of this if we wish to understand it. Definite mental images are required if we wish to understand, to understand properly.

We must say to ourselves: I am placed into earthly evolution. What I give to earthly evolution through my deeds bears fruit; it bears the fruit of knowledge that has become muse by the fact that I have gained the knowledge of good and evil on the earth. This knowledge lives in the evolution of the earth, this knowledge is there. As I look at this knowledge, however, it becomes something different for me, something that is different from what it originally should have been. It becomes something that I must change if the goal and task of the earth are to be achieved, I see growing out of my earthly deeds something that must become different. The tree grows forth, the tree that becomes the Cross of earthly existence, the tree that becomes something to which the human being must gain a new relationship. For the old relationship allows this tree to grow. The tree of the Cross, of that Cross which grows out of the Luciferically colored evolution of the earth, grows out of Adam's grave, out of the humanity that Adam has become since the temptation. The Tree of Knowledge must become the trunk of the Cross, because the human being must unite himself anew with the properly understood Tree of Knowledge as it is now in order to achieve the goal and task of the earth.

Let us ask ourselves—and here we touch on a significant mystery of spiritual science—what is really the situation with the members we have come to know as the members of human nature? We know to begin with that the highest member of human nature is the “I.” We learn to express our “I” at a definite moment in childhood. We gain a relationship to this “I” at the point to which we have memories in later life. We know from the most varied spiritual scientific considerations that until this point in time the “I” itself was active in forming and structuring us. This remains the case until the point at which we begin to have a relationship, a conscious relationship, to our “I.” In the child, this “I” is there also, but it works within, its first task is to form our body. To begin with it creates the super-sensible forces in the spiritual world. When we have gone through conception and birth it still works creatively on our body for a period of time that lasts a few years, until we have our body as a tool so that we can consciously comprehend our self as an “I.”

A deep mystery is connected with this entry of the “I” into the human bodily nature. When we meet a person we ask him, “How old are you?” He gives his age as the years that have passed since his birth. As has been said, we touch here on a certain mystery of spiritual science that will become more and more clear as time passes. Today, however, I will only touch on it, will only share it with you. What a person gives as his age at a definite time of his life is connected with his physical body. He says nothing other than that his physical body has been developing for so-and-so long since his birth. The “I” does not go along with this development of the physical body. The “I” stays there,

This is a difficult mystery to grasp, that the “I” stays at the point of time to which we can recollect, the point at which we remember ourselves. It does not change with the body, it stays there. For just this reason we always have it in front of us so that, as we look, it can mirror our experiences for us. The “I” does not take part in our earthly journey. Only when we have gone through the portal of death must we take the path that we call Kamaloca backward again to our birth in order to re encounter our “I” and then to take it along on our further journey. The “I” remains behind. The body pushes itself forward in years while the “I” remains behind, the “I” stays there. This is difficult to comprehend because one cannot imagine that something remains standing in time while time keeps moving. Nevertheless this is so, the “I” stays there, and it remains there because the “I” does not actually unite itself with what approaches the human being from earthly existence. It remains united with those forces we call ours in the spiritual world. The “I” remains there, the “I” fundamentally remains in the form in which it has been conferred on us, as we know, by the Spirits of Form.

This “I” is retained in the spiritual world. It must be held in the spiritual world, for otherwise we would never be able to achieve again the earth's original goal and aim as human beings during our earthly evolution. What the human being underwent here on earth because of his Adam nature, you could say, of which he takes an impress into the grave when he dies as Adam—this clings to the physical body, etheric body, and astral body, this comes from these. The “I” waits, waits with everything that is in it, waits the entire time undergone by the human being on the earth. It looks only toward the further development of the human being as he repeats it for himself when he has gone through the portal of death and follows this path in reverse. This means that we remain with our “I” back in the spiritual world (this is meant in a specific sense). Humanity ought to become conscious of this fact. And humanity is only able to become conscious of this fact because at a certain time the Christ descended out of those worlds to which the human being belongs, out of the spiritual worlds. In the body of Jesus He prepared for Himself, in the way we know, in a twofold way, what was to serve Him as body on the earth.

If we understand ourselves correctly, we always look back through our entire earthly life, back to our childhood. Our spiritual element has remained back in our childhood. We always look toward this if we wish to understand things correctly. And humanity ought to be instructed to look toward what the spirit out of the heights can say: “Let the little children come to me.” Not adults, who are connected with the earth, but rather the little children. In having been given the festival of Christmas in addition to the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity ought to be instructed in this. Otherwise the Mystery of Golgotha would only need to have been conferred on humanity in relation to the last three years of Christ's life, when Christ was in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Christmas festival shows how Christ prepared the human body for himself during childhood. This is what should lie at the basis of the Christmas experience: to know how the human being has actually always remained connected with what is approaching now through what remained behind during growth, remaining in the heavenly heights. In the form of the child, the human being should be reminded of the human-divine element from which he has distanced himself on descending to the earth but that now has returned to him. The human being ought to be reminded of this childlike element in him. He ought to be reminded of Him who brought back the childlike element to him again. Though it was not easy, one can see the force that works so wonderfully to carry this precisely in the way in which the festival of the World Child, the Christmas festival, was developed in areas of Central Europe.

What we have seen today was only a small example of the Christmas plays, of which there are many. It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared.

These plays disappeared even in rural areas in approximately the middle of the eighteenth century, but it is wonderful to see how some remained alive. A man about whom I have spoken, Karl Julius Schröer, collected such Christmas plays in the area of western Hungary in the 1850's. He searched for them in the area around Pressburg, and then further beyond Pressburg into Hungary. Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply. These Christmas plays, handwritten, remained in the hands of certain families in the villages and were treasured as something especially sacred. When October came around, people began thinking about having to perform these plays during the Christmas season for the people of the village. Then the best behaved boys and girls were selected, and they began to prepare themselves: they were not permitted to drink wine or any alcoholic beverages, nor were they permitted—which could well happen in such places, as we know—to be rowdy and rambunctious on Sundays, and they were not permitted any other transgressions. They really had to “lead a holy life,” as is said. Thus people were aware that a certain moral mood of the soul had to be assumed by those who were to devote themselves to the performance of such plays during the Christmas season. Such plays were not to be performed out of ordinary worldliness.

They were performed with all the naïveté with which the peasants could perform something like that. And yet the whole performance was permeated with deepest seriousness, with infinite seriousness. The plays gathered by Karl Julius Schröer and others in the most varied areas have in common this deep seriousness, the seriousness with which one approached the Christmas mystery. But this was not always the case. We only need to go back just a few centuries to find something different, to encounter something most curious. In looking at how these Christmas plays arose and gradually developed in areas of Central Europe, we are able to see especially clearly how overwhelmingly the Christmas thought was active.

But this thought was not immediately taken up in the way I have just described it, approached with a certain kind of sacred modesty, with great seriousness and awareness of the significance of the event that lived in the feeling. No indeed! In many areas it began by simply placing a manger in some kind of side altar in this or that church. (This was still the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it goes back to still earlier times.) A manger was placed there, and therefore a stall, in which were placed an ox and an ass, as well as the Child and two dolls representing Joseph and Mary. At first they used a very naive sculptural technique, but then it was desired to bring more life to the figures. This came first from the side of the clergy. Thus priests dressed themselves up, one as Joseph, the other as Mary, and they then represented these figures. They played these roles instead of using the dolls. In the earliest times they even presented the scene in Latin, because in the old churches, if the performance was to present a deep meaning it was considered important that those who saw or listened understand as little as possible, that they only see the outer mimicry.

After some time this was no longer tolerated. The people also wanted to understand what was performed in front of them. Gradually there was a transition to presenting portions of it in the local language spoken in those regions. And finally the people awoke to a feeling of wanting to participate, to experience it themselves. Yet it remained foreign to them, quite foreign. We need only consider that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example, familiarity with these holy mysteries of Christmas night, for example, did not exist. Today we take these things for granted, but at that time it was not there. You have to keep in mind that year in and year out people heard the mass, also hearing it at Christmas (held at midnight during the holy night), but that they did not hear the Bible—the Bible was only there for the priest to read. Thus they knew only single fragments of the sacred story. The initial attempts by the priests to present these things dramatically were really in order to acquaint the people with what had once taken place. In this way the people learned to know what was written in the Bible.

I must say something now that I beg you not to misunderstand. It can be mentioned because it corresponds to purely historical truth. Some kind of mystery mood or something similar did not immediately emanate from these presentations once people wanted to participate in the Christmas plays. This is not how it was. Rather the longing to take part in what was presented to them, to be more active participants, was what brought people closer to the situation. And finally they had to be permitted to participate to some extent; things had to be made more comprehensible to the people. By making it more comprehensible, things moved forward step by step. For example, people did not understand initially that in the manger lay the Child. They had never seen that, they had never seen a child in a manger. Certainly earlier, when they were not permitted to understand anything, they just accepted it, but new that they wanted to participate it needed to be made completely comprehensible to them.

At that time only a rocking cradle was placed in front of them, and people began to take part by walking by the cradle, each person rocking the Child in it for a little while. Gradually similar moments of participation developed. There were even regions where first a person approached the manger very seriously and then, on finding the Child there, incredible noise erupted and everyone screamed and pointed and danced, indicating the pleasure they now experienced because the Child had been born. This was taken up entirely in a mood emanating from the longing to participate themselves, the longing to experience a story. In the story, however, there was such grandness, something so powerful, that out of this completely profane mood—for it was initially a profane mood—there developed gradually, bit by bit, the holy mood about which I have just been speaking. The situation itself poured its holiness out over a reception that initially could not have been called holy. Especially in the Middle Ages, the holy story of Christmas first had to conquer the people. And the story conquered them to such an extent that while they were performing their plays they wanted to prepare themselves morally m such an intensive way.

What was it that conquered human feelings, the human soul? It was the tow of the Child, the view of what has remained holy in the human being while the three remaining bodies unite themselves with earthly development. Although in certain regions and during certain periods the story of Bethlehem took on grotesque forms, it was inherent in human nature to develop this holy view toward the nature of the Child, which is connected with what entered into Christian evolution from the very beginning: the consciousness of how what remains behind in the human being when he begins his earthly development must enter into a new bond with that which united itself with earthly man. He gives over to the earth the wood out of which the Cross must be made, through which he establishes a new bond.

In older times of Christian development in Central Europe, only the Easter thought was present among the people. Only in the way in which I have described it has the Christmas thought gradually been added. What we find written in the Heliand, or similar works, was recorded by individual poets, but it did not become popular. The popular aspects of Christmas arose in the way I have just described, which shows in a truly grand way how the thought of the bond with the childlike, with the pure, truly childlike element that appeared in a new form in the Jesus Child, has conquered the human being. If we bring the power of this thought together with the fact that this thought can live in souls so as to unite all people (and to begin with it is the only thought in our earthly existence that can do so), we come to the true Christ thought. The Christ thought therefore becomes great and must gradually become stronger in us if the further evolution of the earth is to take place in the right way.

Just consider how far removed the human being in present earthly existence still is from what is concealed in the depths of the Christ thought. A book has just recently been published—perhaps you have read it—written by Ernst Haeckel, World War Thoughts About Life, Death, and Infinity and Religion. A book by Ernst Haeckel is certainly one that proceeds from the most serious search for truth. This book by Ernst Haeckel points to what is now taking place on the earth, how people are at war with one another, how they hate one another, how countless deaths result every day. Haeckel mentions all these thoughts that obtrude upon people so painfully. Certainly he always mentions these thoughts with the background of looking at the world as he sees it from his standpoint. We know about his standpoint, having often spoken about it and about how we can recognize in Haeckel one of the greatest scientists. This standpoint leads also to other things, but it leads to something that can be observed in the newer phases of Haeckel's development.

Haeckel offers some thoughts about the World War. He also remarks on how much blood is flowing now, how many deaths surround us, and he asks himself, “Can the thoughts of religion survive next to these events?” As Haeckel asks it, “Can one believe that there is in any way a wisdom-filled providence, a beneficent God who rules the world, when every day one sees that by mere chance,” so he says, “so many people's lives are ended, that they die by no cause that can be proven to be related in any way to some kind of wise world rulership? Instead, by chance” he says, “this one or that one is struck by a bullet, suffering either death or injury. In the face of all these events, do thoughts of wisdom, thoughts of divine providence, have any meaning? Must not just such events as these prove that the human being must stay in one place, that he is nothing but what the outer, materialistically conceived history of evolution shows us, and that fundamentally everything in earthly existence is ruled not by divine providence but by chance? Is it possible in the face of all these events to have another religious thought” says Haeckel, “to do something other than resign oneself, saying that a person simply surrenders his body and dissipates into the cosmos?”

One can ask further, however—Haeckel no longer asks this question—“If this cosmos is nothing but the play of atoms, does human life really provide a meaning for earthly existence?” As I said, Haeckel does not ask this question anymore, but he does give an answer in his Christmas book: “Precisely events such as those that touch us so painfully now, just such events show that there is no justification for believing in any kind of beneficent providence or wise guidance of the world or anything like it; it is impossible now to maintain that anything like this weaves through and guides the world. Therefore resignation, seeing one's own way, is all there is.”

Haeckel's book is also a Christmas book! It is a Christmas book meant very sincerely and honestly. But this book is based on a significant prejudice. It rests on the prejudice that, it is not permissible to seek in a spiritual way for the earth's meaning, that humanity is prohibited from looking for a meaning of the earth in a spiritual way.

If it is only the outer course of events that is considered, one does not see this meaning. This is what happens to Haeckel. Then the situation must remain with the recognition that this life has no meaning. This is what Haeckel means. Looking for meaning is not permitted! But is it not so that another might come and say something further: that if we look only at these contemporary events externally, pointing out that countless bullets are destroying human lives, if we look only at these events and no meaning results, then precisely because of this we must seek for this meaning in a deeper way. It is precisely events such as these that show us we cannot amply look for and believe in meaning by looking just at what is going on now on the earth—by seeing only that these human souls vanish like their bodily natures. Instead we must look at what they are now beginning as they pass through the portal of death. In short, another person could come and say that precisely because no meaning can be found in the outer events, the meaning must be looked for outside the outer, the meaning must be looked for in the super-sensible.

Is this any different from looking at the same matter in a completely different realm? For one who thinks the way Haeckel thinks today, Haeckel's science can become a refusal to recognize any meaning in earthly existence. It can happen that a person wants to prove out of the events that are taking place so painfully today that earthly life as such has no meaning. But, if one takes hold of the problem in our way—we have done this frequently—precisely this same science takes as its starting point the deep and great meaning that can be unraveled by us in world phenomena. For this to happen, however, something spiritual must be active in the world; we must be able to unite ourselves with the spiritual, It is impossible for people to find a meaning for the earth, a real meaning, because our educated people do not yet understand that it is necessary to permit the power to work upon them that once so wonderfully conquered hearts, souls: the power that arose on looking at the Christmas mystery, from which a profane comprehension evolved into a sacred comprehension. Scholars are unable to grasp this yet; they cannot yet unite the Christ impulse with what they see in the outer world, and thus it is impossible for them to find a meaning for the earth.

Thus one must say that science, for all its great progress of which people are so proud today—and justifiably so - is not in a position out of itself to lead to a view that satisfies the human being. As it goes its way, it can lead in the same way either to meaninglessness or to the meaning of the earth, just as in any other domain. Consider this outer science so proudly developed in the last few centuries, especially from the nineteenth century until today, with all its wonderful laws. Consider everything that surrounds us today. It has been brought forth by this science. We no longer burn light at night in the same way that Goethe burned his. We burn light in a completely different way, and we illuminate our rooms in a completely different way. Consider everything that lives in our souls today out of our science; it has arisen through the great progress of science, of which humanity is justifiably proud. What is the effect of this same science? It is a blessing if man develops it as such. But today, especially since it is such a complete science, it produces indomitable instruments of death. Its progress serves destruction just as well as construction. Just as the science acknowledged by Haeckel can lead to either meaning or meaninglessness, so the science that can achieve such great things can serve either construction or destruction. Arid if the main thing is this science, science will bring forth evermore horrible and frightful works of destruction out of the same source that leads to constructive ends.

Science does not directly have an impulse to bring humanity forward. If only this were seen once, this science would be evaluated in the right way! Only then would it be known that something else must be an integral part of humanity's evolution than what the human being can achieve through this science. For what is this science, after all? In reality it is nothing but the tree that grows out of the grave of Adam. And the time is fast approaching when people will recognize that this science is the tree growing out of Adam's grave. And the time will come when people will recognize that this tree must become the wood that is the Cross of humanity. This wood can lead to a blessing only if that which unites in the right way with what lies beyond death, but lives already here in the human being, is crucified on the Cross: that which we behold on the holy Christmas night if we experience it in the right way, in its true mystery, that which can fee presented in a childlike way but that bears the highest mysteries. Isn't it actually wonderful that in the simplest way it can be said to the people: something entered which is active through human life on earth, something that actually may not go beyond childhood. It is related to what the human being belongs to as a super-sensible being. Isn't it wonderful that this super-sensible-invisible element, in the most eminent sense, can come so near to human souls in such a simple picture? Simple human souls!

Yes, those who are educated must also undertake the path taken by those simple human souls. There was a time when the Child was not presented in the manger. The Child in the manger was not presented, but instead the Child sleeping on the Cross was presented. The Child sleeping on the Cross! A wonderfully profound picture, bringing the entire thought to expression that I have wanted to let arise before your souls today.

And is it not basically very simple to express this thought? Yes, it is. Indeed, let us look once for the origin of those impulses that oppose each other in the world today in such a horrible way. Where do these impulses originate? Where does everything originate that makes the life of humanity so difficult today? Where is the origin of all this? It lies in everything we become in the world only after that point of time at which we can recollect ourselves. If we go back beyond this point of time, if we go back to the point in time at which we are called the “little children who are able to enter the kingdom of heaven”—this is not where it originates. At that point nothing of what today is in battle and dispute resides in human souls. The thought can be expressed this simply, but spiritually we must consider the fact that there is something so original in the human soul that it goes beyond all human strife, beyond all human disharmony.

We have often spoken of the ancient mysteries that wanted to awaken in human nature that which permits the human being to look up into the super-sensible. And we have spoken of the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, perceptible for all human beings on the stage of history, has presented the super-sensible mystery. There is something that fundamentally unites us with the true Christ thought. We have this by virtue of the fact that we are able to have moments in our life (I am now speaking directly, not in a pictorial way) in which, despite everything we are in the outer world, we can bring alive in us what we received as a child. We can do this by going backward, feeling ourselves back at the child's standpoint? we can do this by looking toward the human being as he develops between birth and death, so that we are able to sense within us what we received as a child.

In the public lecture about Johann Gottlieb Fichte which I gave last Thursday, I could have added something, but at the time it would not have been understood. I could have said something that would have clarified a great deal that lives in this devout man in such a peculiar way. I would have spoken about why he actually developed the very particular way he did, and I would have had to say that this was because, more than other people, he retained the childlike quality in himself despite growing old. He retained more of the childlike quality in himself than other people do. Such people actually grow less old. It is really true that what existed in childhood remains more in such people than in others. This is generally the secret of many great human beings, that right into their oldest age they are able to remain children in a certain way; even when they die, they die as children, though this must be expressed only partially, since one must be connected with life.

The Christmas mystery thus speaks to what lives in us as a childlike quality, it speaks with a view to the divine Child who was selected to take up the Christ, it speaks with a view to the one who was already overshadowed by the Christ, who went through the Mystery of Golgotha in reality to heal the earth.

Let us become conscious of the fact that when we surrender the imprint of our higher self, when we surrender our physical body to the earth, it is not a merely physical process. Something spiritual is also taking place. But this spiritual aspect takes place in the right way only by virtue of the fact that the Christ being has streamed into the earth aura, the Christ being who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. We cannot see the earth in its completeness if we do not see that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ has been united with the earth. We can bypass the Christ, just as we can bypass everything super-sensible, if we feel ourselves constituted only of earthly matter and only able to relate to it. But if the earth is to have a real and true meaning for us, we can not bypass Christ. For this reason everything depends on our being able to awaken in ourselves something that will open the view into the spiritual world.

Let us make our Christmas festival into something that it must be especially for us. Let us make it into a festival that serves not only the past but the future, the future that little by little is to bring to birth the spiritual life for all humanity. We want to unite ourselves with the prophetic feeling, the prophetic intimation, that such a birth of the spiritual life must be brought to humanity, that presiding over humanity's future a great holy night must be active, coming to birth out of what gives meaning to the earth from human thoughts. The earth received this meaning objectively through the fact that the Christ being united Himself with the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha. In the holy night let us think of how, out of the depths of darkness, light must enter human evolution, the light of spiritual life. The old light of spiritual life that was there before the Mystery of Golgotha had to pass away, gradually it had to be extinguished. The light must arise again, must be reborn after the Mystery of Golgotha through the consciousness in the human soul, that this human soul is connected with what Christ became for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha,

If there are more and more people who come to know how to conceive of Christmas in such a spiritual scientific sense, this Christmas night will develop a force in human hearts and human souls that will have its meaning in all times. It will have meaning in times in which people surrender themselves to feelings of joy but also in times in which people have to surrender themselves to the feelings of pain that must penetrate us today when we think of the great misery of our tune.

Since looking up to the spiritual gives meaning to the earth, I would like to share with you today the words of one who expressed this so beautifully:

What gave my eye this force,
That all misshapen forms have dissolved.
That the nights become like brilliant suns.
Disorder becomes order, decay life?

What intricate weaving through time, through space,
Guides me surely to the eternal well
Of the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and of all delight.
And in destroying immerses all my striving?

It is this: into Urania's eye, the deep,
Itself clear, blue, still, pure
Lightflame, I myself have quietly gazed.

Since then, this eye rests in my depths
And is in my being—the eternal
One, Lives in my life, sees in my seeing.

And in a second small poem:

Nothing is but God, and God is nothing but life,
You know it, you and I know it together,
But how would knowing be there
If it were not knowing of God's life?

“How gladly would I surrender myself to this,
Yet where do I find it? Somehow it flows
Into knowing, then transforms itself into seeming,
Mingling with it, surrounded by its sheaths.”

Quite dearly the sheath rises up before you,
It is your I, what is destructible dies,
And henceforth only God lives in your striving.

See through what survives this striving,
Then the sheath becomes visible to you as sheath.
And unveiled you see divine life.

Certainly people do not always know what they ought to do with those who point to perceiving the spiritual that gives meaning to the earth. It is not only materialists who do not know what to do. Others who believe they are not materialists because they are always saying, “God! God! God!” or “Lord! Lord! Lord!” often do not know what to make of these individuals who guide us to the spiritual. For what can one do with a person who says. “There is nothing but God! Everything is God! Everywhere, everywhere is God!” He was seeking for God in everything, the one who said:

See through what survives this striving,
Then the sheath becomes visible to you as sheath
And unveiled, you see divine life!

An individual who wants to see divine life everywhere could be accused of not allowing the world to exist, of denying the existence of the world. Though one could call him a world-denier, his contemporaries called him a denier of God, and they therefore chased him away from the colleges and universities. The words I have read to you are those of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If the Mystery of Golgotha continues to live on in the human soul through earthly existence—amid what is connected with this Mystery of Golgotha in the Christmas mystery—it can serve as an impulse resounding in the soul. Fichte is a perfect example of how, when this is the case, a path is opened on which we can find the consciousness in which our own “I” flows together with the earth “I”—for this earth “I” is the Christ. Through this, we develop something in the human being that must become greater and greater if the earth is to move toward the development for which it was destined from the beginning.

Therefore we especially wish, out of the spirit of our spiritual knowledge renewed in the sense it has been today, to let the Christmas thought become an impulse in us. By looking up to this Christmas thought, we wish to attempt to see from what surrounds us not the meaninglessness of earthly evolution; rather, in the suffering and pain, in the strife and hate, we hope to see something that ultimately helps humanity forward, something that really brings humanity a bit forward.

It is not so important to look for causes, which anyway are so easily concealed in partisan strife. It is much more important for what happens today to focus on the possible effects, those effects that we must picture to ourselves as healing, as bringing healing for humanity.

The nations and people who are in a position to shape something that can be healing for humanity of the future out of what is able to sprout from the blood-drenched soil will be led to the right approach. What can be healing for humanity, however, can develop only if people find the way into the spiritual worlds, if people do not forget that there was not only one Christmas but that there must be an everlasting Christmas, an everlasting coming-to-birth of the divine- spiritual in the physical, earthly human being.

Especially today we wish to enclose the sacredness of this thought in our souls, we wish to hold it for the time surrounding Christmas, which can he a symbol for the evolution of light also in its outer course. In these days, at this time of year, darkness, earth darkness, will be here to the greatest degree possible on earth. When the earth lives in this deepest outer darkness, however, we know that the earth soul experiences her light, beginning to awaken to the highest degree.

The time of Christmas, then, is connected with the time of spiritual awakening. And with this time of spiritual awakening, the memory of the spiritual awakening for earthly evolution through the Christ Jesus shall be united. We therefore have the institution of the Christmas festival especially at this time.

Let us unite the Christmas thought with our soul in. this cosmic, and at the same time earthly, moral sense. Then, reinforced and strengthened with this Christmas thought as best as we can, let us look upon everything surrounding us to want what is right for the progress of events, also wanting what is appropriate in the development of deeds of the present time.

157a. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin Rudolf Steiner
It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared.
Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply.

157a. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin
Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin
Rudolf Steiner

It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared.

Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply.

157a. A Christmas Thought and the Secret of the Ego 19 Dec 1915, Berlin Translated by Gerald Karnow, Alice Wuslin Rudolf Steiner
Especially this year as Christmas approaches, we must think of the kind of feelings that unite us with these words and their deep and universal meaning—that deep meaning for the world experienced by countless people in such a way that the word peace resounds through it, the word peace in a time when peace is utterly absent in the widest circles of humanity. How do we think of these Christmas words in this time? Nevertheless, it is a thought that, perhaps in connection with these words resounding through the world, touches us ever more deeply in the present than in other times. One thought! Nations confront one another full of animosity. Blood, so much blood saturates our earth. We have witnessed and must feel countless deaths around us in this time. Infinite suffering weaves around our inner atmosphere of feeling. Hate and antipathy race through spiritual space and can easily show how far human beings in our time still are from that love spoken about by the One whose birth is celebrated at Christmas. One thought, however, is especially predominant. We think how enemy stands against enemy, opponent against opponent, how human beings can bring death to each other and how they then can go through the same portal of death with the thought of the divine leader of light, the Christ Jesus. We think of how, all over the earth, where there is war and pain and discord, those who are otherwise in such discord can be united. Within their deepest hearts they carry their connection with Him who entered the world on the day we celebrate at Christmas. We think how through all animosity, through all antipathy, through all hate, a feeling can impress itself into all human souls everywhere in these times, can impress itself in the midst of blood and hate: the thought of the innermost link with the One, with Him who thereby united hearts through something higher than what is able to separate human beings on earth. And so it is nevertheless a thought of infinite greatness, a thought of infinite depth of feeling, this thought of the Christ Jesus who harmonizes human beings no matter what their discord might be, no matter what goes on in the world. If we take hold of the thought in this way, we will want to grasp it even more intensely, especially in our time. Then we will have an intimation of how strongly this thought is connected with what must become great and strong and powerful within human evolution. If this were to happen, much that must still be fought for in such a bloody way at this time could be achieved in another way by human hearts, by human soul. That He makes us strong, that He strengthens us, that He teaches us all over the earth really to feel in the truest sense of the word the Christmas verse, transcending everything that separates us: those who truly feel themselves connected with the Christ Jesus must promise this to themselves on Christmas night again and again. There is a tradition within the history of Christianity that arose repeatedly in later times and was a custom in certain Christian regions over many centuries. Already in far distant times in various regions, mostly emerging from Christian churches, there were presentations for believers of the mystery of Christmas night. Especially in these most ancient times, the presentation of the mystery of Christmas night began with a reading, yes, at times even with a presentation of the story of Creation, the story of Creation as it is presented at the beginning of the Bible. Especially around the time of Christmas it was described how, out of the depths of the cosmos, the universal Word resounded, how out of the universal Word creation arose gradually, bit by bit. It was described how Lucifer approached the human being and how human beings thereby began earthly existence in a different way from what would have been the case had Lucifer not approached, in a way different from what was originally destined. The entire story of the temptation of Adam, and Eve was presented, and then it was shown how the human being was integrated, as if were, into ancient, pre-testamental history. Only as time went on do we find what was presented in more or less detail in the various plays that developed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in Central Europe, of which we have seen a small example just now. At the Christmas festival, an infinitely great thought originally drew together the beginning of the Old Testament with the mysterious story of the Mystery of Golgotha. Very little indeed has remained of what it was from this thought that drew together the two sacred stories. Only a little of this insight has remained, one contemporary example being our calendar, in which the day before Christmas Eve is called the day of Adam and Eve. This has its origin in the same thought. In more ancient times, however, there were those with deeper thoughts, with deeper feelings, a deeper knowledge received from their teachers who taught them how they were to grasp the mystery of Christmas and the mystery of Golgotha. For them a great, encompassing symbolic thought was always being presented: the thought of the origin of the Cross. The God who is presented to us in the Old Testament gives one commandment to the human being, represented by Adam and Eve: “You may eat from all the fruits of the garden; only the fruits that grow on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil must you avoid, because they who have eaten of that fruit would be cast out of the original scene of their existence.” The tree, however—which was now represented in the most varied ways—came by some means into the sequence of generations that were the original generations from which the bodily sheath of the Christ Jesus proceeded. This came about in the following way (as it was presented in certain periods of time): when Adam, the sinful man was buried, this tree again grew out of his grave and was thus removed from Paradise. In this story we see the thought suggested that Adam rests in the grave, the human being who went through sin, the human being who was misguided by Lucifer; he rests in the grave and he unites himself with the body of the earth; but out of his grave the tree grows, the tree that can now grow out of the earth with which Adam's body has been united. The wood of this tree passes over to the generations to which Abraham also belongs, to which David belongs. And out of the wood of this tree, which actually stood in Paradise, which then grew again out of Adam's grave, out of the wood of this tree, the Cross was made on which Christ Jesus was crucified. This is the thought that was made clear again and again by the teachers of those who were to understand the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha out of deeper foundations. There is a deep meaning in the fact that in ancient times deep thoughts came to expression in such pictures, and this meaning holds good for the present as well. It will become clear to us that it still holds true for today. We have also acquainted ourselves with the thought of the Mystery of Golgotha that says to us; the Being who has lived on earth through the body of Jesus poured out over the earth what He could bring to the earth, He poured it into the aura of the earth. What the Christ brought into the earth has since then become united with the entire corporeality of the earth. The earth has become something different since the Mystery of Golgotha. What Christ brought out of heavenly heights down to the earth is living in the earth aura. If we consider this spiritually in connection with the ancient picture of the tree, this picture shows us the entire relationship from a higher point of view. The Luciferic principle entered the human being when the human being made his beginning on earth. The human being, as he is now in his union with the Luciferic principle, belongs to the earth, indeed he forms a part of the earth. And when we lay his body into the earth, this body is not rust as anatomy sees it; this body is at the same time the outer mold of what the human being is in his inner being within the earthly realm. It can then also be clear out of spiritual science that it is not just what goes through the portal of death into the spiritual world that belongs to the being of man; rather it becomes clear that the human being through all his activity, through all his deeds, is united with the earth. He is really united with it in the same way as those happenings that the geologist, the mineralogist, the zoologist, etc., find connected with the earth. It is only when the human being goes through the portal of death that one could say that there is a termination for the human individuality of that which unites him to the earth. Our outer form, however, which we surrender in some way to the earth, enters the body of the earth. It carries in itself the stamp of what the earth has become through the fact that Lucifer entered into earthly evolution. What the human being achieves on the earth carries the Luciferic principle; the human being brings this Luciferic principle into the aura of the earth. It is not only what was originally the intention of the human being that arises, that blossoms out of human deeds, out of the activities of human beings; out of human deeds there arises something that has the Luciferic element mixed in with it. This then is in the aura of the earth. And when we now look upon the tree growing out of the grave of the human being Adam, who was led astray by Lucifer, if we look at the tree that has become something different through the Luciferic temptation—this tree that was originally the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—we see everything that the human being brought about by the fact that he left his original state of existence, that he became something different through, the Luciferic temptation and that something was thereby brought into earthly evolution that had not previously been intended. We see the tree grow out of what forms the physical body for the earth, which was stamped in its earthly form by that which permits the human being to appear on the earth in a lower sphere than he would have if he had not gone through the Luciferic temptation. Something grows out of man's entire earthly existence that has come into humanity's evolution through the Luciferic misguidance, through the temptation. When we seek knowledge, we seek it in a different way than was originally predestined. This makes it appear that something different grows out of our earthly deeds from what would have been the case in accordance with the gods' original intention. We form an earthly existence that is not as the gods originally intended for us; we mix something else into it, and we must form very definite pictures of this if we wish to understand it. Definite mental images are required if we wish to understand, to understand properly. We must say to ourselves: I am placed into earthly evolution. What I give to earthly evolution through my deeds bears fruit; it bears the fruit of knowledge that has become muse by the fact that I have gained the knowledge of good and evil on the earth. This knowledge lives in the evolution of the earth, this knowledge is there. As I look at this knowledge, however, it becomes something different for me, something that is different from what it originally should have been. It becomes something that I must change if the goal and task of the earth are to be achieved, I see growing out of my earthly deeds something that must become different. The tree grows forth, the tree that becomes the Cross of earthly existence, the tree that becomes something to which the human being must gain a new relationship. For the old relationship allows this tree to grow. The tree of the Cross, of that Cross which grows out of the Luciferically colored evolution of the earth, grows out of Adam's grave, out of the humanity that Adam has become since the temptation. The Tree of Knowledge must become the trunk of the Cross, because the human being must unite himself anew with the properly understood Tree of Knowledge as it is now in order to achieve the goal and task of the earth. Let us ask ourselves—and here we touch on a significant mystery of spiritual science—what is really the situation with the members we have come to know as the members of human nature? We know to begin with that the highest member of human nature is the “I.” We learn to express our “I” at a definite moment in childhood. We gain a relationship to this “I” at the point to which we have memories in later life. We know from the most varied spiritual scientific considerations that until this point in time the “I” itself was active in forming and structuring us. This remains the case until the point at which we begin to have a relationship, a conscious relationship, to our “I.” In the child, this “I” is there also, but it works within, its first task is to form our body. To begin with it creates the super-sensible forces in the spiritual world. When we have gone through conception and birth it still works creatively on our body for a period of time that lasts a few years, until we have our body as a tool so that we can consciously comprehend our self as an “I.” A deep mystery is connected with this entry of the “I” into the human bodily nature. When we meet a person we ask him, “How old are you?” He gives his age as the years that have passed since his birth. As has been said, we touch here on a certain mystery of spiritual science that will become more and more clear as time passes. Today, however, I will only touch on it, will only share it with you. What a person gives as his age at a definite time of his life is connected with his physical body. He says nothing other than that his physical body has been developing for so-and-so long since his birth. The “I” does not go along with this development of the physical body. The “I” stays there, This is a difficult mystery to grasp, that the “I” stays at the point of time to which we can recollect, the point at which we remember ourselves. It does not change with the body, it stays there. For just this reason we always have it in front of us so that, as we look, it can mirror our experiences for us. The “I” does not take part in our earthly journey. Only when we have gone through the portal of death must we take the path that we call Kamaloca backward again to our birth in order to re encounter our “I” and then to take it along on our further journey. The “I” remains behind. The body pushes itself forward in years while the “I” remains behind, the “I” stays there. This is difficult to comprehend because one cannot imagine that something remains standing in time while time keeps moving. Nevertheless this is so, the “I” stays there, and it remains there because the “I” does not actually unite itself with what approaches the human being from earthly existence. It remains united with those forces we call ours in the spiritual world. The “I” remains there, the “I” fundamentally remains in the form in which it has been conferred on us, as we know, by the Spirits of Form. This “I” is retained in the spiritual world. It must be held in the spiritual world, for otherwise we would never be able to achieve again the earth's original goal and aim as human beings during our earthly evolution. What the human being underwent here on earth because of his Adam nature, you could say, of which he takes an impress into the grave when he dies as Adam—this clings to the physical body, etheric body, and astral body, this comes from these. The “I” waits, waits with everything that is in it, waits the entire time undergone by the human being on the earth. It looks only toward the further development of the human being as he repeats it for himself when he has gone through the portal of death and follows this path in reverse. This means that we remain with our “I” back in the spiritual world (this is meant in a specific sense). Humanity ought to become conscious of this fact. And humanity is only able to become conscious of this fact because at a certain time the Christ descended out of those worlds to which the human being belongs, out of the spiritual worlds. In the body of Jesus He prepared for Himself, in the way we know, in a twofold way, what was to serve Him as body on the earth. If we understand ourselves correctly, we always look back through our entire earthly life, back to our childhood. Our spiritual element has remained back in our childhood. We always look toward this if we wish to understand things correctly. And humanity ought to be instructed to look toward what the spirit out of the heights can say: “Let the little children come to me.” Not adults, who are connected with the earth, but rather the little children. In having been given the festival of Christmas in addition to the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity ought to be instructed in this. Otherwise the Mystery of Golgotha would only need to have been conferred on humanity in relation to the last three years of Christ's life, when Christ was in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christmas festival shows how Christ prepared the human body for himself during childhood. This is what should lie at the basis of the Christmas experience: to know how the human being has actually always remained connected with what is approaching now through what remained behind during growth, remaining in the heavenly heights. In the form of the child, the human being should be reminded of the human-divine element from which he has distanced himself on descending to the earth but that now has returned to him. The human being ought to be reminded of this childlike element in him. He ought to be reminded of Him who brought back the childlike element to him again. Though it was not easy, one can see the force that works so wonderfully to carry this precisely in the way in which the festival of the World Child, the Christmas festival, was developed in areas of Central Europe. What we have seen today was only a small example of the Christmas plays, of which there are many. It comes from olden times and is one of the kind of Christmas plays that I have already pointed to. Only a few of these so-called Paradise Plays have remained, which were performed at Christmas and in which the story of Creation was presented. It has remained connected to the Shepherds' Play and with the play of the Three Kings, who bring their gifts. Much of this used to live in numerous Christmas plays, but to a large extent they have now disappeared. These plays disappeared even in rural areas in approximately the middle of the eighteenth century, but it is wonderful to see how some remained alive. A man about whom I have spoken, Karl Julius Schröer, collected such Christmas plays in the area of western Hungary in the 1850's. He searched for them in the area around Pressburg, and then further beyond Pressburg into Hungary. Others collected such Christmas plays in different areas, but what Karl Julius Schröer was able to find at that time of the performance of these Christmas plays and the customs connected with them can enter our hearts deeply. These Christmas plays, handwritten, remained in the hands of certain families in the villages and were treasured as something especially sacred. When October came around, people began thinking about having to perform these plays during the Christmas season for the people of the village. Then the best behaved boys and girls were selected, and they began to prepare themselves: they were not permitted to drink wine or any alcoholic beverages, nor were they permitted—which could well happen in such places, as we know—to be rowdy and rambunctious on Sundays, and they were not permitted any other transgressions. They really had to “lead a holy life,” as is said. Thus people were aware that a certain moral mood of the soul had to be assumed by those who were to devote themselves to the performance of such plays during the Christmas season. Such plays were not to be performed out of ordinary worldliness. They were performed with all the naïveté with which the peasants could perform something like that. And yet the whole performance was permeated with deepest seriousness, with infinite seriousness. The plays gathered by Karl Julius Schröer and others in the most varied areas have in common this deep seriousness, the seriousness with which one approached the Christmas mystery. But this was not always the case. We only need to go back just a few centuries to find something different, to encounter something most curious. In looking at how these Christmas plays arose and gradually developed in areas of Central Europe, we are able to see especially clearly how overwhelmingly the Christmas thought was active. But this thought was not immediately taken up in the way I have just described it, approached with a certain kind of sacred modesty, with great seriousness and awareness of the significance of the event that lived in the feeling. No indeed! In many areas it began by simply placing a manger in some kind of side altar in this or that church. (This was still the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it goes back to still earlier times.) A manger was placed there, and therefore a stall, in which were placed an ox and an ass, as well as the Child and two dolls representing Joseph and Mary. At first they used a very naive sculptural technique, but then it was desired to bring more life to the figures. This came first from the side of the clergy. Thus priests dressed themselves up, one as Joseph, the other as Mary, and they then represented these figures. They played these roles instead of using the dolls. In the earliest times they even presented the scene in Latin, because in the old churches, if the performance was to present a deep meaning it was considered important that those who saw or listened understand as little as possible, that they only see the outer mimicry. After some time this was no longer tolerated. The people also wanted to understand what was performed in front of them. Gradually there was a transition to presenting portions of it in the local language spoken in those regions. And finally the people awoke to a feeling of wanting to participate, to experience it themselves. Yet it remained foreign to them, quite foreign. We need only consider that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example, familiarity with these holy mysteries of Christmas night, for example, did not exist. Today we take these things for granted, but at that time it was not there. You have to keep in mind that year in and year out people heard the mass, also hearing it at Christmas (held at midnight during the holy night), but that they did not hear the Bible—the Bible was only there for the priest to read. Thus they knew only single fragments of the sacred story. The initial attempts by the priests to present these things dramatically were really in order to acquaint the people with what had once taken place. In this way the people learned to know what was written in the Bible. I must say something now that I beg you not to misunderstand. It can be mentioned because it corresponds to purely historical truth. Some kind of mystery mood or something similar did not immediately emanate from these presentations once people wanted to participate in the Christmas plays. This is not how it was. Rather the longing to take part in what was presented to them, to be more active participants, was what brought people closer to the situation. And finally they had to be permitted to participate to some extent; things had to be made more comprehensible to the people. By making it more comprehensible, things moved forward step by step. For example, people did not understand initially that in the manger lay the Child. They had never seen that, they had never seen a child in a manger. Certainly earlier, when they were not permitted to understand anything, they just accepted it, but new that they wanted to participate it needed to be made completely comprehensible to them. At that time only a rocking cradle was placed in front of them, and people began to take part by walking by the cradle, each person rocking the Child in it for a little while. Gradually similar moments of participation developed. There were even regions where first a person approached the manger very seriously and then, on finding the Child there, incredible noise erupted and everyone screamed and pointed and danced, indicating the pleasure they now experienced because the Child had been born. This was taken up entirely in a mood emanating from the longing to participate themselves, the longing to experience a story. In the story, however, there was such grandness, something so powerful, that out of this completely profane mood—for it was initially a profane mood—there developed gradually, bit by bit, the holy mood about which I have just been speaking. The situation itself poured its holiness out over a reception that initially could not have been called holy. Especially in the Middle Ages, the holy story of Christmas first had to conquer the people. And the story conquered them to such an extent that while they were performing their plays they wanted to prepare themselves morally m such an intensive way. What was it that conquered human feelings, the human soul? It was the tow of the Child, the view of what has remained holy in the human being while the three remaining bodies unite themselves with earthly development. Although in certain regions and during certain periods the story of Bethlehem took on grotesque forms, it was inherent in human nature to develop this holy view toward the nature of the Child, which is connected with what entered into Christian evolution from the very beginning: the consciousness of how what remains behind in the human being when he begins his earthly development must enter into a new bond with that which united itself with earthly man. He gives over to the earth the wood out of which the Cross must be made, through which he establishes a new bond. In older times of Christian development in Central Europe, only the Easter thought was present among the people. Only in the way in which I have described it has the Christmas thought gradually been added. What we find written in the Heliand, or similar works, was recorded by individual poets, but it did not become popular. The popular aspects of Christmas arose in the way I have just described, which shows in a truly grand way how the thought of the bond with the childlike, with the pure, truly childlike element that appeared in a new form in the Jesus Child, has conquered the human being. If we bring the power of this thought together with the fact that this thought can live in souls so as to unite all people (and to begin with it is the only thought in our earthly existence that can do so), we come to the true Christ thought. The Christ thought therefore becomes great and must gradually become stronger in us if the further evolution of the earth is to take place in the right way. Just consider how far removed the human being in present earthly existence still is from what is concealed in the depths of the Christ thought. A book has just recently been published—perhaps you have read it—written by Ernst Haeckel, World War Thoughts About Life, Death, and Infinity and Religion. A book by Ernst Haeckel is certainly one that proceeds from the most serious search for truth. This book by Ernst Haeckel points to what is now taking place on the earth, how people are at war with one another, how they hate one another, how countless deaths result every day. Haeckel mentions all these thoughts that obtrude upon people so painfully. Certainly he always mentions these thoughts with the background of looking at the world as he sees it from his standpoint. We know about his standpoint, having often spoken about it and about how we can recognize in Haeckel one of the greatest scientists. This standpoint leads also to other things, but it leads to something that can be observed in the newer phases of Haeckel's development. Haeckel offers some thoughts about the World War. He also remarks on how much blood is flowing now, how many deaths surround us, and he asks himself, “Can the thoughts of religion survive next to these events?” As Haeckel asks it, “Can one believe that there is in any way a wisdom-filled providence, a beneficent God who rules the world, when every day one sees that by mere chance,” so he says, “so many people's lives are ended, that they die by no cause that can be proven to be related in any way to some kind of wise world rulership? Instead, by chance” he says, “this one or that one is struck by a bullet, suffering either death or injury. In the face of all these events, do thoughts of wisdom, thoughts of divine providence, have any meaning? Must not just such events as these prove that the human being must stay in one place, that he is nothing but what the outer, materialistically conceived history of evolution shows us, and that fundamentally everything in earthly existence is ruled not by divine providence but by chance? Is it possible in the face of all these events to have another religious thought” says Haeckel, “to do something other than resign oneself, saying that a person simply surrenders his body and dissipates into the cosmos?” One can ask further, however—Haeckel no longer asks this question—“If this cosmos is nothing but the play of atoms, does human life really provide a meaning for earthly existence?” As I said, Haeckel does not ask this question anymore, but he does give an answer in his Christmas book: “Precisely events such as those that touch us so painfully now, just such events show that there is no justification for believing in any kind of beneficent providence or wise guidance of the world or anything like it; it is impossible now to maintain that anything like this weaves through and guides the world. Therefore resignation, seeing one's own way, is all there is.” Haeckel's book is also a Christmas book! It is a Christmas book meant very sincerely and honestly. But this book is based on a significant prejudice. It rests on the prejudice that, it is not permissible to seek in a spiritual way for the earth's meaning, that humanity is prohibited from looking for a meaning of the earth in a spiritual way. If it is only the outer course of events that is considered, one does not see this meaning. This is what happens to Haeckel. Then the situation must remain with the recognition that this life has no meaning. This is what Haeckel means. Looking for meaning is not permitted! But is it not so that another might come and say something further: that if we look only at these contemporary events externally, pointing out that countless bullets are destroying human lives, if we look only at these events and no meaning results, then precisely because of this we must seek for this meaning in a deeper way. It is precisely events such as these that show us we cannot amply look for and believe in meaning by looking just at what is going on now on the earth—by seeing only that these human souls vanish like their bodily natures. Instead we must look at what they are now beginning as they pass through the portal of death. In short, another person could come and say that precisely because no meaning can be found in the outer events, the meaning must be looked for outside the outer, the meaning must be looked for in the super-sensible. Is this any different from looking at the same matter in a completely different realm? For one who thinks the way Haeckel thinks today, Haeckel's science can become a refusal to recognize any meaning in earthly existence. It can happen that a person wants to prove out of the events that are taking place so painfully today that earthly life as such has no meaning. But, if one takes hold of the problem in our way—we have done this frequently—precisely this same science takes as its starting point the deep and great meaning that can be unraveled by us in world phenomena. For this to happen, however, something spiritual must be active in the world; we must be able to unite ourselves with the spiritual, It is impossible for people to find a meaning for the earth, a real meaning, because our educated people do not yet understand that it is necessary to permit the power to work upon them that once so wonderfully conquered hearts, souls: the power that arose on looking at the Christmas mystery, from which a profane comprehension evolved into a sacred comprehension. Scholars are unable to grasp this yet; they cannot yet unite the Christ impulse with what they see in the outer world, and thus it is impossible for them to find a meaning for the earth. Thus one must say that science, for all its great progress of which people are so proud today—and justifiably so - is not in a position out of itself to lead to a view that satisfies the human being. As it goes its way, it can lead in the same way either to meaninglessness or to the meaning of the earth, just as in any other domain. Consider this outer science so proudly developed in the last few centuries, especially from the nineteenth century until today, with all its wonderful laws. Consider everything that surrounds us today. It has been brought forth by this science. We no longer burn light at night in the same way that Goethe burned his. We burn light in a completely different way, and we illuminate our rooms in a completely different way. Consider everything that lives in our souls today out of our science; it has arisen through the great progress of science, of which humanity is justifiably proud. What is the effect of this same science? It is a blessing if man develops it as such. But today, especially since it is such a complete science, it produces indomitable instruments of death. Its progress serves destruction just as well as construction. Just as the science acknowledged by Haeckel can lead to either meaning or meaninglessness, so the science that can achieve such great things can serve either construction or destruction. Arid if the main thing is this science, science will bring forth evermore horrible and frightful works of destruction out of the same source that leads to constructive ends. Science does not directly have an impulse to bring humanity forward. If only this were seen once, this science would be evaluated in the right way! Only then would it be known that something else must be an integral part of humanity's evolution than what the human being can achieve through this science. For what is this science, after all? In reality it is nothing but the tree that grows out of the grave of Adam. And the time is fast approaching when people will recognize that this science is the tree growing out of Adam's grave. And the time will come when people will recognize that this tree must become the wood that is the Cross of humanity. This wood can lead to a blessing only if that which unites in the right way with what lies beyond death, but lives already here in the human being, is crucified on the Cross: that which we behold on the holy Christmas night if we experience it in the right way, in its true mystery, that which can fee presented in a childlike way but that bears the highest mysteries. Isn't it actually wonderful that in the simplest way it can be said to the people: something entered which is active through human life on earth, something that actually may not go beyond childhood. It is related to what the human being belongs to as a super-sensible being. Isn't it wonderful that this super-sensible-invisible element, in the most eminent sense, can come so near to human souls in such a simple picture? Simple human souls! Yes, those who are educated must also undertake the path taken by those simple human souls. There was a time when the Child was not presented in the manger. The Child in the manger was not presented, but instead the Child sleeping on the Cross was presented. The Child sleeping on the Cross! A wonderfully profound picture, bringing the entire thought to expression that I have wanted to let arise before your souls today. And is it not basically very simple to express this thought? Yes, it is. Indeed, let us look once for the origin of those impulses that oppose each other in the world today in such a horrible way. Where do these impulses originate? Where does everything originate that makes the life of humanity so difficult today? Where is the origin of all this? It lies in everything we become in the world only after that point of time at which we can recollect ourselves. If we go back beyond this point of time, if we go back to the point in time at which we are called the “little children who are able to enter the kingdom of heaven”—this is not where it originates. At that point nothing of what today is in battle and dispute resides in human souls. The thought can be expressed this simply, but spiritually we must consider the fact that there is something so original in the human soul that it goes beyond all human strife, beyond all human disharmony. We have often spoken of the ancient mysteries that wanted to awaken in human nature that which permits the human being to look up into the super-sensible. And we have spoken of the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, perceptible for all human beings on the stage of history, has presented the super-sensible mystery. There is something that fundamentally unites us with the true Christ thought. We have this by virtue of the fact that we are able to have moments in our life (I am now speaking directly, not in a pictorial way) in which, despite everything we are in the outer world, we can bring alive in us what we received as a child. We can do this by going backward, feeling ourselves back at the child's standpoint? we can do this by looking toward the human being as he develops between birth and death, so that we are able to sense within us what we received as a child. In the public lecture about Johann Gottlieb Fichte which I gave last Thursday, I could have added something, but at the time it would not have been understood. I could have said something that would have clarified a great deal that lives in this devout man in such a peculiar way. I would have spoken about why he actually developed the very particular way he did, and I would have had to say that this was because, more than other people, he retained the childlike quality in himself despite growing old. He retained more of the childlike quality in himself than other people do. Such people actually grow less old. It is really true that what existed in childhood remains more in such people than in others. This is generally the secret of many great human beings, that right into their oldest age they are able to remain children in a certain way; even when they die, they die as children, though this must be expressed only partially, since one must be connected with life. The Christmas mystery thus speaks to what lives in us as a childlike quality, it speaks with a view to the divine Child who was selected to take up the Christ, it speaks with a view to the one who was already overshadowed by the Christ, who went through the Mystery of Golgotha in reality to heal the earth. Let us become conscious of the fact that when we surrender the imprint of our higher self, when we surrender our physical body to the earth, it is not a merely physical process. Something spiritual is also taking place. But this spiritual aspect takes place in the right way only by virtue of the fact that the Christ being has streamed into the earth aura, the Christ being who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. We cannot see the earth in its completeness if we do not see that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ has been united with the earth. We can bypass the Christ, just as we can bypass everything super-sensible, if we feel ourselves constituted only of earthly matter and only able to relate to it. But if the earth is to have a real and true meaning for us, we can not bypass Christ. For this reason everything depends on our being able to awaken in ourselves something that will open the view into the spiritual world. Let us make our Christmas festival into something that it must be especially for us. Let us make it into a festival that serves not only the past but the future, the future that little by little is to bring to birth the spiritual life for all humanity. We want to unite ourselves with the prophetic feeling, the prophetic intimation, that such a birth of the spiritual life must be brought to humanity, that presiding over humanity's future a great holy night must be active, coming to birth out of what gives meaning to the earth from human thoughts. The earth received this meaning objectively through the fact that the Christ being united Himself with the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha. In the holy night let us think of how, out of the depths of darkness, light must enter human evolution, the light of spiritual life. The old light of spiritual life that was there before the Mystery of Golgotha had to pass away, gradually it had to be extinguished. The light must arise again, must be reborn after the Mystery of Golgotha through the consciousness in the human soul, that this human soul is connected with what Christ became for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, If there are more and more people who come to know how to conceive of Christmas in such a spiritual scientific sense, this Christmas night will develop a force in human hearts and human souls that will have its meaning in all times. It will have meaning in times in which people surrender themselves to feelings of joy but also in times in which people have to surrender themselves to the feelings of pain that must penetrate us today when we think of the great misery of our tune. Since looking up to the spiritual gives meaning to the earth, I would like to share with you today the words of one who expressed this so beautifully: What gave my eye this force, That all misshapen forms have dissolved. That the nights become like brilliant suns. Disorder becomes order, decay life? What intricate weaving through time, through space, Guides me surely to the eternal well Of the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and of all delight. And in destroying immerses all my striving? It is this: into Urania's eye, the deep, Itself clear, blue, still, pure Lightflame, I myself have quietly gazed. Since then, this eye rests in my depths And is in my being—the eternal One, Lives in my life, sees in my seeing. And in a second small poem: Nothing is but God, and God is nothing but life, You know it, you and I know it together, But how would knowing be there If it were not knowing of God's life? “How gladly would I surrender myself to this, Yet where do I find it? Somehow it flows Into knowing, then transforms itself into seeming, Mingling with it, surrounded by its sheaths.” Quite dearly the sheath rises up before you, It is your I, what is destructible dies, And henceforth only God lives in your striving. See through what survives this striving, Then the sheath becomes visible to you as sheath. And unveiled you see divine life. Certainly people do not always know what they ought to do with those who point to perceiving the spiritual that gives meaning to the earth. It is not only materialists who do not know what to do. Others who believe they are not materialists because they are always saying, “God! God! God!” or “Lord! Lord! Lord!” often do not know what to make of these individuals who guide us to the spiritual. For what can one do with a person who says. “There is nothing but God! Everything is God! Everywhere, everywhere is God!” He was seeking for God in everything, the one who said: See through what survives this striving, Then the sheath becomes visible to you as sheath And unveiled, you see divine life! An individual who wants to see divine life everywhere could be accused of not allowing the world to exist, of denying the existence of the world. Though one could call him a world-denier, his contemporaries called him a denier of God, and they therefore chased him away from the colleges and universities. The words I have read to you are those of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If the Mystery of Golgotha continues to live on in the human soul through earthly existence—amid what is connected with this Mystery of Golgotha in the Christmas mystery—it can serve as an impulse resounding in the soul. Fichte is a perfect example of how, when this is the case, a path is opened on which we can find the consciousness in which our own “I” flows together with the earth “I”—for this earth “I” is the Christ. Through this, we develop something in the human being that must become greater and greater if the earth is to move toward the development for which it was destined from the beginning. Therefore we especially wish, out of the spirit of our spiritual knowledge renewed in the sense it has been today, to let the Christmas thought become an impulse in us. By looking up to this Christmas thought, we wish to attempt to see from what surrounds us not the meaninglessness of earthly evolution; rather, in the suffering and pain, in the strife and hate, we hope to see something that ultimately helps humanity forward, something that really brings humanity a bit forward. It is not so important to look for causes, which anyway are so easily concealed in partisan strife. It is much more important for what happens today to focus on the possible effects, those effects that we must picture to ourselves as healing, as bringing healing for humanity. The nations and people who are in a position to shape something that can be healing for humanity of the future out of what is able to sprout from the blood-drenched soil will be led to the right approach. What can be healing for humanity, however, can develop only if people find the way into the spiritual worlds, if people do not forget that there was not only one Christmas but that there must be an everlasting Christmas, an everlasting coming-to-birth of the divine- spiritual in the physical, earthly human being. Especially today we wish to enclose the sacredness of this thought in our souls, we wish to hold it for the time surrounding Christmas, which can he a symbol for the evolution of light also in its outer course. In these days, at this time of year, darkness, earth darkness, will be here to the greatest degree possible on earth. When the earth lives in this deepest outer darkness, however, we know that the earth soul experiences her light, beginning to awaken to the highest degree. The time of Christmas, then, is connected with the time of spiritual awakening. And with this time of spiritual awakening, the memory of the spiritual awakening for earthly evolution through the Christ Jesus shall be united. We therefore have the institution of the Christmas festival especially at this time. Let us unite the Christmas thought with our soul in. this cosmic, and at the same time earthly, moral sense. Then, reinforced and strengthened with this Christmas thought as best as we can, let us look upon everything surrounding us to want what is right for the progress of events, also wanting what is appropriate in the development of deeds of the present time.