The Cosmic New Year
9 January 2026
Warm regards for the New Year! We would like to thank everyone who contributed to our Annual Appeal. Your gifts enable this site to touch more lives world-wide and bring anthroposophy to life in the hearts and minds of mankind. The world-wide outpouring of support we received far exceeded our expectations.1
During Advent and Christmas, we reviewed our earthly, evolutionary journey through the course of time and space to arrive at our current four-fold nature: the physical, etheric, astral and I/Self.2
At the center is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the Tau-Rho: the Christ, who brought the original Word of the Cosmic realms into the evolution of humanity.3 As on New Year's Eve:
“It is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year.” 4
Now, it is our task to bring the twelve cosmic forces we contemplated during the Holy Nights into our four-fold nature and carry them forth into the world through brotherly love. How do we accomplish this heroic mission? Practice. Rudolf Steiner refers to the human body as the “temple of the Godhead.” We can "search the human figure for the hidden secrets of the spiritual world" to find knowledge that is of utmost importance to the human heart and soul. We have twelve members that at first appear as a unity of one form, but in reality the twelve forces of the cosmos work actively through us and out into the world through our actions. 5
Meditations and Exercises
Rudolf Steiner provided extensive instructions and exercises for personal development. He describes a hidden world that flows through the material world, thereby manifesting as our reality. To understand the role of the human being and why we are here, one must apply oneself to this endeavour.
Unlike teachings based primarily on belief, Steiner's path for such esoteric study is a cognitive one of what he terms, Spiritual Science. It is one of gnosis—higher knowledge of spiritual matters. He posits we can learn to know how to experience the spiritual realms as a reality through our thinking, feeling and willing. The choice of whether or not to learn and practice this knowledge is ours.
[J]ust as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so too one does not need to be a spiritual scientist oneself—although one can become one up to a point—to be able to test whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can feel the beauty of a picture without being a painter oneself, so with ordinary common sense one can perceive what the spiritual scientist says about the soul. That one can see it, I think I have established all the more firmly in recognizing how souls thirst for a profounder approach to psychology and to the great riddles of existence in relation to the soul. 6
To promote wider adoption of the spiritual practices outlined by Rudolf Steiner, we have compiled a summary of fundamental texts. These include foundational teachings, meditative verses and mantras, prayers and other exercises. We hope you will take this information to heart during this critical time in human evolution.
NOTES
- Results of the Rudolf Steiner Archive 2025 Annual Appeal. We will keep this fundraiser open for anyone who still wishes to contribute.
- See our article, Advent & Christmas: A Time of Transition. highlighting some of Rudolf Steiner's lectures on the signs and symbols of the Christmas festival.
- For a description of the planetary incarnations (Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan), epochs (Polaric, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, Post Atlantean, 6th and 7th), and cultural periods of the Post Atlantean Epoch (Ancient Indian, Ancient, Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greco-Roman, 5th/present, future 6th & 7th), see Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult (Esoteric) Science, Chapter IV, GA 13.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Cosmic New Year, GA 195, Lecture IV, 31 December 1919, Stuttgart.
- Rudolf Steiner, Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, GA 137, Lecture VI, 8 June 1912, Oslo.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Tension Between East and West, GA 83, Lecture 2. Anthroposophy and Psychology, 2 June 1922, Vienna.