The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Today, we want to prepare ourselves for the coming together that we actually have to accomplish in the first days of our being together here, by letting the Act of Consecration of Man — as I would like to call the sacrifice of the Mass — take effect on us, even if today it is only by interpreting and hinting, because some things simply have to be explained.

It is indeed the case that this Act of Consecration of Man contains everything that should result from the soul shepherd's mood and the soul shepherd's connection with the spiritual world. In the Act of Consecration of Man, the Christian current also lives in perpetual and direct presence, and this current of Christian substance moves through this Act of Consecration of Man, so that this Act of Consecration of Man must actually stand at the center of Christian worship. So for now, we will let it take effect on us as such. From it, much will arise that may need to be added in a few words as a kind of commentary. But in the next few days, we will work to be able to perform a demonstration that is fully adequate for the Mass. So I will hint at what I cannot explain here.

Accompanied by his acolytes, the priest comes out from somewhere, where he has prepared himself in an appropriate manner, carrying the chalice, which he carries covered. The acolyte on the right carries the missal; the acolyte on the left carries a bell, with which he indicates by three rings that the Act of Consecration of Man will begin. The chalice is first placed on the altar, left covered. The priest descends the steps of the altar and says before the altar: “Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man from the Revelation of Christ, in worship of Christ, in devotion to the deed of Christ.

May the Father-God be in us
The Son-God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

And turning around:

Christ in you.

The altar boy says:

And fill your spirit.

The priest:

May God the Father be in us
The Son of God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

In the consciousness of our humanity, we feel the divine Father. He is in all that we are. Our substance is His substance. Our being is His being. He goes through everything in us through our existence.

In the experience of the Christ in our humanity, we feel the divine Son. He reigns as the Spirit-Word through the world. He creates in all that we create. Our being is His creating. Our life is His creating life. He creates through us in all soul-making.

In the grasping of the spirit by our humanity, we feel the healing God. May He shine as the Spirit-light through the world. May He shine in everything we behold. May our beholding be imbued with His Spirit-light. May our cognition be accepted by Him into His spiritually radiant life. May He spiritualize all the activity of our human soul. [Rudolf Steiner now reads the text of the gospel story (see GA 343, pages 414 f.) and the beginning of the gospel of John:]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
This was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being.
In this was life, and the life was the light of men.
And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.
There came a man sent from God, whose name was John.
He came for a witness, to bear witness about the Light, so that through him all might believe.
He was not the light, but a witness to the light. For the true light that enlightens all men was coming into the world.
It was in the world, and the world was made through it, but the world did not recognize it.
But it came to individual people (it came to people with a sense of self), and these individual people (people with a sense of self) did not receive it.
But those who received it were able to reveal themselves as children of God through it.
Those who trusted in his name came into being not from blood, not from the will of the flesh, and not from human will, but from God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
John bears witness about him and clearly proclaims: This was he of whom I said, 'After me will come the one who has a higher rank than I, for he was before me. For we have all received out of his fullness, and grace upon grace has been bestowed upon us.
For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Christ.
God has never seen anyone with his eyes. The only begotten Son, who was in the bosom of the Father of the world, has become the guide in this beholding.

[Rudolf Steiner now reads the creed (see CW 343, p. 510) and then the text of the offertory, the consecration and the communion (see CW 343, pages 416, 464 and 471) and concludes:)

At the end, the opening epistle is repeated on the right side of the altar. Then:

The Act of Consecration of Man, that was it.

In the next few days, we will demonstrate and perform this act, which I have only hinted at, again in its entirety, as best we can. But it seems to me that from what has just been said, the spirit of this consecration can flow into your hearts, and that by living the spirit of this consecration in our hearts, we can accomplish in a worthy manner what we will have to accomplish in the coming days.

I note that in an original consecration service, a sermon was inserted at the point after the reading of the Gospel, before proceeding to the Creed. Today, the Catholic Church often separates this sermon from the sacrifice of the Mass and regards it as a separate entity. This is understandable, since in modern times preaching has taken on a more intellectual character, whereas in the original services of consecration, precisely at the point where the Christian gospel word, perceived as the word of God, was read, what was then preaching could be spoken in direct connection with this word. It was something that continually needed symbolic, pictorial clothing, something that was not merely shaped out of the subjective will and conviction of the preacher, but something that was felt to be released in the heart by the divine word of the Gospel and that could be given to the faithful as a kind of gift of the continuation of the Gospel word. One must only imagine how this human consecration ritual has emerged from ancient and most ancient cults and has found its way to the corresponding ritual for the flow of Christianity through the evolution of the earth. The further we go back in pre-Christian times, the more we find that the very place where cults of consecration took place was regarded as something that was set apart from the rest of the world, that was consecrated and hallowed in itself. Thus, when one was in this place, one felt as if it were a second world; even in the outer world, this still often resounds in those who have an inkling of such things. Goethe often speaks of the great and the small world. He does not mean a church by the “small world,” but since he had become a Freemason, he meant by the small world the Masonic lodge, and the great world is the universe for him. For it was clear to him that where a ritual act is performed, there is a world, and he calls it the “small world” because it is spatially small compared to the “big world”. Schiller meant something deeper when he made the statement:

Friends, you seek the sublime.
But the sublime does not dwell in space.

By this he meant that in the smaller space, in the “small world”, the sublime should be sought, independently of all external greatness, in the smaller world the greater world.

And so we can say: Since space was already considered sacred and hallowed, it was the case that the performance of the consecration cult was associated with the celebrants - who also placed the teaching brother, the preacher, before the faithful — felt themselves to be representatives here on earth, through whom the continuation of the word of God spoken in the Gospel could flow, in that they refrained from subjective formulation and endeavored to use such a formulation that expressed itself in symbols and images.

For our time, however, it will be entirely in harmony with the spiritual world if you hold a sermon proper alongside the Act of Consecration of Man and if this is inserted between the Gospel reading and the saying of the Creed, and if perhaps something more clothed in symbolic forms, according to the seasons, is spoken to the hearts and souls of the members of the community. This could be brief and calculated not so much to teach as to edify, as a continuation of the gospel word in the symbol.

Then, as the next step, I would like to say, as a preparatory step, that you imagine this human consecration ritual – which, in a sense, is being used by me in this way for the first time – as having been received directly from the spiritual world , whereas all those who have performed the consecrations so far have sought their authorization in the continuous succession within the Christian [church], so that those who have performed these consecrations have said to themselves: I have been ordained by one who was ordained by another, and so on through the centuries until the last one was ordained by one of the apostles, who himself followed the Christ. Apostolic continuity is, after all, what the celebrants in the churches invoke as justification for the Mass, that is, those who have performed the Mass until now. In the Catholic Church, this apostolic continuity has gradually become something that has taken on an external character. Therefore, in this day and age, it is possible for us to receive this authorization directly from the spiritual world, so that you can celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass. And the fact that you can do this should be the focus of our efforts over the next few days.

You will have to create a substitute for the place of receiving the apostolic blessing in Christian tradition, so to speak, through the mood and the state of your soul. At the starting point of your new priestly work, you will have to be completely clear that your will and your feelings, and thus your thinking, which depends on your feelings and your will, are such that everything you accomplish as a pastor is to be accomplished in the name of the Christ, the Christ whom you recognize in the particular spirituality and spiritual worlds as they have been presented from the most diverse points of view within the anthroposophical movement. But above all, you must become aware of the Christ in the present, the Christ who, in the immediate present, sends his power into everything you accomplish in detail and who, above all, is present, really present, in the Act of Consecration of Man. If you did not have the awareness of the presence of Christ in the Act of Consecration of Man and of the meaning of this Act of Consecration of Man, and if you did not take the opportunity to bring about the direct presence of Christ, you would not perform this Act of Consecration of Man in the right spirit.

Now it will be a matter of my bringing a formula with me tomorrow that each of you will speak in the sense that by speaking this formula, you will then take it into your heart in such a way that it becomes, as it were, a that by realizing what is contained in the formula, he feels that he is spiritually part of this community, which you have resolved to be part of. This will constitute the first preparation for what for this group should be ordination to the priesthood, which should also be undertaken during this time. But it will be necessary for you first to feel united with the spiritual that must live in you through inwardly speaking such a formula if you are to live together in the right way in the community you have formed.

Then, however, it will be necessary for you to prepare this community in such a way that it has an authority that is taken for granted, so that when communities are formed, the pastor is not chosen by election, but rather that - even if the initiative to appoint a pastor comes from the community, this community turns to this newly founded original community of priests, which you are to be, so that a pastor may be sent to it, the community. Only in this way, that even if the initiative comes from the community, the soul shepherd is requested by the priestly community you have founded, only in this way is the meaning fully fulfilled, that this priestly community of yours carries the spiritual from spiritual worlds down to those who want to be members of the community.

It will then also be necessary that we — having, as it were, praised ourselves for what we want to be through the formula just mentioned — also establish a kind of hierarchy tomorrow among those who have initially dedicated themselves to this community. The serious event of Dr. Geyer's resignation has shaken what I believe was in harmony with the spiritual worlds: that Dr. Geyer, Dr. Rittelmeyer and Licentiate Bock should initially form this triumvirate, which should set the tone in a certain sense, because the fact of the matter is that such a center must be there. Of course, such a center cannot be created today with the same jurisdiction that similar communities in older times had endowed to a central power. But nevertheless, measures will be necessary that make the cohesion of this circle appear as serious as possible, so that once someone has decided to be in it, they do not simply leave again without the act of leaving being felt as a world fact and then also understood accordingly. Communities that aspire to form spiritual leadership and into which one can freely enter and leave as one pleases, carry within themselves the seed of their own destruction. That is a law of the spiritual world. It is a law of the spiritual world that the decision to enter such a community within one earth life should be so strong that one cannot take an equally strong one a second time. This should indicate the intensity of the idea that must underlie the matter. Therefore, arbitrary entry and exit cannot belong to the real development of this community. Although I am thoroughly convinced that each of you has carefully considered in your soul what your attitude to this community should be, I would still like us to reflect on the question of whether you really want to belong to it, and to discuss it with your soul before tomorrow.

Then tomorrow we will also be able to resolve the question of how we organize the central power, since there cannot be two of them after all. That is a spiritual impossibility. There is no true collaboration of wills when there are two. There can be one, as has been established in the Catholic Church by the dogma of infallibility; but then the connection with the spiritual world is very often lost when external impulses of command are joined by that which is supposed to be connected with the spiritual world. The two are too balanced and do not produce any results, even if this is not always consciously perceived. This is based on a spiritual law. So there must be three. And at this moment we are indeed in a position to look for the third one from the circle. But how we will do this will perhaps only become clear to us tomorrow. For the matter of course was a different one before the matter had progressed as far as it has now; at that time this triad had emerged as a matter of course. Now Dr. Geyer's resignation must be regarded as an extraordinarily serious event, and it forces us to clarify the question of the central orientation tomorrow. I will try to bring you suggestions for this matter, which I believe is in line with the leading spiritual powers, whose leadership we must indeed maintain if what you are founding as a community is to flourish. And in accordance with these leading spiritual powers, who want a new Christian community and implore their blessing, we want to arrange all our further steps.

My dear friends! The point of today's talk is to clarify some things that you must allow to live firmly in your soul, and on the other hand, to identify a kind of central authority, at least in principle, even if the personal cannot be resolved today. I would like to emphasize first of all that today such things as the [oath] I am talking about here are usually misunderstood. They are understood as if it were a vow that one makes to anyone. Such views have come about particularly through the Catholic Church and the Masonic orders, which have always misunderstood these things and have misunderstood them all the more as time has progressed and different conditions have arisen for the whole being of man than was the case in earlier times. Today it is only possible to understand such things [as the swearing-in ceremony], which I have to give here in a formula, as a kind of examination of oneself, as something that one writes into one's soul when one takes on such an important mission as you want to take on. It will be necessary for those who take on this mission to actually proclaim it before those who are walking with them, so that everyone who walks with them knows with whom they belong. And so it is important that this kind of vow, which one makes to oneself, contains the things that are necessary for the spiritual world today.

The first thing is that it must contain what one should make clear to oneself as one's sense of belonging to the spiritual world. And here it is important that for someone who wants to work as you do, this work must be spiritually linked to the figure of Christ and to the event of Golgotha, in such a way that the spiritual nature of and that one's entire activity is developed as an implementer of that which has been introduced into the order of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. One must come to recognize the present and future meaning of earthly evolution as coming from the Mystery of Golgotha.

But now something else is important. It is important not to understand such a matter only in a personal sense or in a narrow human sense, but to understand it as something that one professes before the whole world, and thus also before the higher hierarchies, and to accept the real consequences, that is, to fully recognize in a spiritual way what the Catholic Church, albeit in an externalized way, does recognize. She has indeed externalized everything and only retained the external forms for everything, but at least the external forms are recognized by the Church, even if not by the individual priest. This is shown, for example, by the fact that anyone who leaves the priesthood of the Catholic Church has the skin scraped off his fingers with which he has touched the consecrated host.

Then, of course, it is necessary to keep the most important moral qualities alive in oneself through constant practice, because only under the influence of these moral qualities is it possible to achieve real work from the spiritual world.

This is what the formula that I have to present to you says. It expresses it in the form in which, I would say, the cult of the spiritual world can really be expressed in human words. I would like to make it clear that the way I feel about this movement is entirely consistent with my presentation of this formula. How you then activate it, that is, how you then make such a vow in common - but in such a way that the others are present - that will then depend on you. It must be clearly understood that I shall always maintain the attitude towards this movement which I have defined at the outset, that I can therefore be of service in an advisory capacity for the external organization, but that what is to be done must come from your own ranks. This is not because I want to reject a sense of responsibility, because such a sense is also connected with the advice I give; but because it is really a matter of, once this movement has been established, keeping it independent, so that it can most certainly have the most intimate relationship with the anthroposophical movement, but nevertheless must stand on its own and should not be something like a branch or twig of the anthroposophical movement. And the anthroposophical movement, too, must, because it must remain a movement of knowledge by its very nature, refrain from founding a religion and in turn maintain its independence from this religious movement. The relationships can be the most intimate, everything can be carried and exchanged with each other, but this distinction must be made in certain ways.

So, first of all, I will read this oath of office to you. You can then comment on it yourself if anything in it is not clear to you, but I will not be able to recommend any significant changes.

“I want to direct my I in active yearning for work out of the spiritual world.”

In Christ and in the event of Golgotha I want to recognize how a supreme spiritual lives in the facts of life on earth.

In the recognition of this interweaving I will find the meaning of my activity.

Thus I will fit myself into the human order.

My self shall only feel meaningful in such an integration.

I will acknowledge that to stray from this path means the decay of my ego to the evil powers of the world.

I will always fight the impulses that prepare the way for such aberrations.

of personal vanity and ambition
inner dishonesty of the soul
and impulses of anger, which alienate the soul from itself.
I will continually renew within myself the awareness that I walk before God's gaze in everything I do.
To recognize and cultivate this as the content of my consciousness, I promise
before the Father-God, who is in me
before the Son of God who creates in me
before the Spirit God, who enlightens me."

This contains everything that, if you keep bringing it to your attention, indicates the direction you must set for yourself if you understand yourself correctly in order to find your way into the movement you want. Naturally, the way in which you carry this out depends on you. Before we proceed, I would like to say that I have given the matter a great deal of thought and that I think that, given the circumstances, it would be best if the remaining board of directors were to make its own additions. At the beginning of such a direction, everything that happens should actually be done in full agreement with all the individuals. Nothing should be done that the individual does not agree with. But on the other hand, it cannot be a matter of voting, but only of ensuring that there is a natural agreement, that people simply know what they want in this direction. For voting is often nothing more than something highly forced, while what is, so to speak, copied from the soul of another can actually lead to the right result. Again, I must leave it to you to decide what you will do with this advice.

Now there is a little more to be said. The point is that a certain wall should also be created to prevent someone who has once been accepted into the circle of your soul shepherds from leaving this circle again without further ado. It is really the case that in such a community there can be no flourishing if people enter and leave again. Therefore, in the times before liberalism enslaved spiritual life, all such communities had the means to exercise jurisdiction over those who had become apostates. We can no longer apply the older forms, which were felt somewhat differently, and therefore, since this whole rationale is something new, a new form must be found for it. This form can hardly consist of anything other than the fact that, when the central executive committee is formed, this central executive committee is given the special pledge that in the event of one resigning, one morally recognizes under all circumstances what the executive committee or a wider circle has decreed regarding the resignation.

In this context, the question of how we ourselves shape the hierarchy should of course be decided right at the beginning of our work. Since there are not very many of you so far, it would of course be quite possible for the board of three to exercise full central power. But perhaps that is not what can be considered right under all circumstances. It would perhaps be good to start with a hierarchy right from the beginning. Later on it will have to be the case that there is a considerable difference between those who have been working for some time and those who have only just begun to work, who have only just entered your circle. And there will have to be some kind of advancement. It will even be necessary to give certain names to the individual degrees to which those concerned ascend. The choice of names is a very difficult matter in general. We have already discussed how the older Latin names, which are not suitable in Protestant areas, can be replaced by German ones. The difficulty here is that separate names will have to be created for each language area into which your movement expands. But that must be accepted. It is difficult, however, because the power to create languages for such things has diminished considerably throughout the civilized world since the 15th century, and has now ceased altogether, so that if one wants to find an adequate word for the matter today, it is not that easy.

For example, I would not be able to find a different word for the Mass than “Human Consecration Ritual”, whereby perhaps “Consecration Ritual” could then be used as an abbreviation. What has been suggested – “sacrifice celebration” – would not really capture the inner meaning of the Mass. You can see that from the fact that the word 'Meß-Opfer' (sacrifice of the Mass) is possible; but if you say 'sacrifice ceremony', it would be a celebration of the sacrifice; but that is not what it is. The point is that through the sacrifice of the Mass, the human soul is brought into connection with the higher world. So the Mass itself can be called a sacrifice, but then something must be added. It is not a mere sacrifice, but one that is further defined by the word “Mass.” But everything that the Mass is can be found, at least to a very high degree, in the words “Human Consecration Ritual.” These words also include the concept that is necessarily associated with the Mass: that it is a congregational matter and that it is done at a gathering. The essence lies in the coming together, in the uniting. Of course, one could object that in Catholicism there are “silent” masses in which the priest, who as a Catholic priest is obliged to say mass every day, simply says mass in some corner of his church and there is actually no congregation; and in a monastery where the monks are priests, each one says his mass at an altar and there is actually no congregation either. But that is not really true. From some of what you have encountered in the texts for worship, you will be able to see that for the real Christian there is no distinction made between the living and the dead. Whether the dead, who are embodied in the body, inhabit the Mass or, as one has to assume when a so-called silent Mass is read, the dead, that is no difference in principle for the real Christian. If one were to see a fundamental difference in this, then one would not take the spiritual world in its full reality. You can also see this from a formula that occurs within the mass ritual itself. So one can say that if it were claimed that there are 'silent' masses, this is actually not true; it contradicts the spirit of Christianity. There are no 'silent' masses, but parish masses, and the coming together is part of the mass. This also belongs to those masses that have now become the opposite of a sacred act, to the fairground masses; the fairground mass also presupposes that people come together.

Coming together is part of the Mass, and that is precisely expressed in the words “Human Consecration Ritual”. But it is a ritual of consecration; the word “consecration” has been retained as a German word for the old word “initiation”. “Consecration” is related to ‘immersion’, to immersing oneself in something; and it has become common to have the feeling that one is immersed in the spirit of the original revelation when speaking of consecration, just as it is designated by the term ‘initiation’, which is of course much more appropriate. Both consecration and initiation lead man back to his divine beginning, to his divine origin. This is what the word “Human Consecration Ritual” may make clear. But it has many syllables, and that is something that can naturally be a stumbling block. In everyday speech, it can be abbreviated to “Weihehandlung”; but “consecration” alone cannot be said, because there are various consecrations, not only consecration of man, but also consecration of priests and even the consecration of utensils. We will manage in the next few days with the other words.

However, I would very much appreciate it if you would express your views on what I have just said. Of course, later on, differences of opinion within your group should not lead to revolutions at every opportunity – although different opinions are perfectly acceptable. But at the beginning, it is possible that consultations may lead to modifications of what is to be created or what was proposed first. So perhaps it would be possible for you to express yourselves at this point, so that we can move forward and arrive at something more definite as soon as possible.

Emil Bock: Perhaps there is already a strong willingness to do this this very afternoon, because after the words that Dr. Steiner spoke to us yesterday, we have prepared ourselves to close our circle with such an inner connection to the matter.

Rudolf Steiner: It was no exception?

Emil Bock: No, no exception has become known. It would only be our task now to find the form for the moment in which we can express this as the content of our souls.

Rudolf Steiner: For the form, it would be necessary to bring a picture of Christ. Therefore, I would think it would be better to start tomorrow. We then bring a picture of Christ that can be taken to this action.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Is there no possibility of doing it in front of the Christ figure in the studio?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not really possible because for that it would have to be finished first. It does not depend on which form of Christ it is, it just has to be a Christ form.

Emil Bock suggests a time: tomorrow, Sunday morning. Rudolf Steiner agrees, as Sunday is also the most suitable day.

Emil Bock suggests asking further questions about things that are still unclear.

One participant would like to hear more about the special vow, and then also about whether the reading of the mass, for example, should also take place daily or how that would be handled.

Rudolf Steiner: As soon as you have been constituted, these things will arise from the matter itself. Daily reading of the fair, at least in meditative form, is something that seems necessary to me. The other, the special vow, refers to the exit. The exit must be made more difficult in a certain way. This is only possible if the formula is applied to this withdrawal, which of course can still be agreed upon at the beginning, but which must later be recognized by anyone who wants to join. It must be included in the formula that the leadership has to decide how to define the step that someone takes when withdrawing, and that he recognizes this from the outset. So you don't just generally acknowledge what it means, but what the person leaving thinks about himself in the individual case, but what the leadership thinks about him. Each individual would recognize this from the outset in the event of leaving. Of course, in today's democratic times, this seems a little harsh, but you really won't get anywhere in spiritual life if you don't create such a wall.

The other thing I would ask you to consider is this: first create a central power of three, and around these three create four others who simply replace the length of time in office with the quality you attach to them; in this way you arrive at an original seven and call the three “upper leaders” and the four others “leaders”. For the others, a word would still have to be found for the old term 'priest', which did not seem right to you either; but I don't have one yet. “Leader” and ‘senior leader’ would initially be terms that could be used. We avoid terms such as ‘bishop’, ‘deacon’ and so on. So originally the top ladder would be the three senior leaders and the four leaders; we do not need a further hierarchy. The rest would be designated by the word that is used for the term ‘priest’. I would also have to advise this.

Emil Bock believes that there are no objections to this.

Wilhelm Kelber asks whether the appointment as a leader and senior leader is limited to a certain time.

Rudolf Steiner: This can only be for a limited time until a leader becomes a senior leader, so it can only be a position that is granted for life because it is connected to the whole being of the person.

Then something about the technical side of the matter. The point is that the original inaugurators of the whole movement, in formulating the plan, have already shown an act that has a significance, and on this basis it would be advisable to make, so to speak, original proposals for the questions that have now been raised. These initial proposals, in my opinion, based on how I have seen the matter develop, could be made by Dr. Rittelmeyer, Mr. Bock, Ms. Spörri and Mr. Klein. I think that this very inner circle should come together and make initial proposals to the others after very serious consideration, so that the fact, which is a fact, is taken into account: the original initiation. Then these proposals would have to be presented to the wider circle, which should do with them as it wishes. When one makes such proposals, it is the case that the smaller the circle, the greater the sense of responsibility with which they are made. Therefore it would be good to make them initially only as advice. In this way it can best be determined what is wanted. It would be good if all this could be worked out before we meet tomorrow at 10 o'clock.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have actually agreed that we want to carry out the whole constitution in consultation with you. We would very much appreciate advice on how to proceed in some form before we ask the group.

Rudolf Steiner: Very well, then we shall proceed in that way. We can undertake the action we have spoken of at ten o'clock, and what you have proposed in the closest circle we can then begin tomorrow after the action.

Emil Bock suggests that, in order to reach a conclusion more quickly, the results of the meeting should be communicated to Dr. Steiner that same day, which he agrees to.

My dear friends! So, we have prepared ourselves initially with regard to the development of the attitude and disposition for the office of carer for souls. Before we now proceed on the basis of what has been created, we must become quite clear about a number of things, because the whole conception, which you entered into by placing your ego in a direct relationship with the spiritual world yesterday, so to speak, is one that already necessitates a spiritual-scientific foundation in a certain sense.

The point is that, as I said in my first discussions, the concept of the “priest” - we will find the name later - points to something other than what is given in today's Protestant conception. In this, the priest is more of a teacher. Now, the point is that it must appear justified in a certain way to distinguish oneself from the ordinary layman. This justification could not exist at all, that is, what we did yesterday would be an unjustified act if the whole concept of your profession were not placed in a spiritual atmosphere, if I may say so. And here we must ask: Can we make the concept of the “community” or, if we use the old word, the “ecclesia” a real one?

In the communities that have been established in more recent times, even if there was a different intention, this community was essentially an association of individuals, and apart from these individuals, there is actually nothing else of which one is fully aware. Now you must remember – what I am saying now is not meant as a theory, but so that it may permeate your work, because only in this way can your work become a true one – you must remember that everything higher that was realized in human primeval times through individual people leads us back to the concept of a group or species soul. In earlier times, groups of people were bound together by blood ties as tribes or, later, as larger blood communities or communities of relatives. But what was bound together in this way could not be counted as one, two, three, and so on, as so many individual people. Never in the mystery was such a community understood as a mere sum of people, but it was understood that a real community spirit is present, not incarnated on earth, but always present when something is to happen from the community.

Mankind has outgrown this way of being connected to the spiritual. But it is in the sense of what emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha, on a higher level, to lead mankind back to associations that have a real sense of community, so that it develops something through which an entity from higher worlds, in the sense of Christianity a servant of Christ himself, descends. “Servant of Christ” means in this case: a part of Christ, so that the community is not alone, but a part of Christ is there. In the times when blood provided the bond of community, the inclination towards the spiritual was an instinctive one and conditioned by physical basis. In the sense of Christianity, all this must be raised to a spiritual level. People must feel that when they gather in the church of their own free will, it means that in a certain sense they are only members of a common, more delicate body, but one that is truly animated and spiritualized. The one who is the priest then feels himself to be the bearer of this communal spirit. Thus it is not merely a matter of intellectual, theoretical, symbolic speech when the reality of the presence of the spiritual is repeatedly pointed out in the ritual forms, when, as it were, what is living down from spiritual worlds is called into the community of believers, into the “Ecclesia”. Therefore, it is necessary that the stripping of the personal also appears externally in the effectiveness of the priest. The priest actually ceases to have any significance as a personality during the most important acts of worship. He is truly a servant of the word, not a teacher of the word, he is a transmitter of the word from divine heights into earthly existence. And the purpose of donning the cultic vestments is to relinquish one's personality and to appear as a representative of a higher order than the human order on earth.

Therefore, we can say: In the Mass Sacrifice, in the Act of Consecration of Man, when we begin with the relay prayer and then proceed to the reading of the Gospel, we are actually only dealing with the first part of the Mass, with a preparation. And if you recall the first words of the relay prayer given to you, you will immediately find the words: “Let us worthily accomplish the Act of Consecration of Man.” The “worthily” is of the utmost importance for the priest's understanding. Every time he celebrates Mass, the priest must be aware that he must first struggle to achieve the dignity to celebrate the Mass. In this struggle for the worthiness to celebrate the Mass, lies precisely the stripping away of the personal. The priest is clothed in priestly garments and proceeds to the altar in them. That is to say, he completely disregards what is human about him, earthly man, earthly personality in this particular incarnation. He must become the instrument for the Spirit to express itself through him. Therefore, he must try each time anew to struggle for worthiness. And then it says [in the prayer of the Mass]: From the revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to Christ's deed. These are words that, in the immediate aftermath of Christ's deed, of the Mystery of Golgotha, are intended to express and support the struggle for an impersonal action.

This is how the service should begin. We must be clear about the fact that the Catholic Church has fostered extensive errors in this regard. It is right that the personality of the priest should not come into consideration, but in many cases it does not take into account the struggle for worthiness and the difficulty of achieving this personality; and so the Roman Catholic view has incorporated the notion that it does not matter if the priest is personally a sinful or even a bad person, because at the moment he celebrates, his personality is not taken into account, because the spiritual power, the spiritual authority, is at work. The Catholic Church has developed this with an extraordinarily great spiritual skill in a one-sided way, and it has been absorbed to a high degree into the consciousness of the faithful. Even the simplest, most primitive Catholics distinguish the spirit-bearer, who stands before the faithful through the symbolic vestments, from the living garment under the vestments, of which many Catholic priests become; he may be a sinful man, but he does not celebrate, the spirit celebrates, for which he is merely the bearer. This kind of Catholic view naturally eliminates the relationship that must exist between the individual personality of the priest and his priestly office. The priestly office is something that comes from the higher worlds. But there is no way around the fact that at least the priest's language is influenced by what he is as an individual human being, that his heart and his mind also influence his language, that he strives for worthiness to be allowed to wear this priestly garment as this one personal human being. Therefore, it is necessary to have a correct understanding of consecration.

What does “consecrate” actually mean? We cannot arrive at an adequate concept in this regard if we simply take a historical view of what has developed over the past few centuries. If we want to proceed historically, we can only do so by considering the acts of consecration as they have existed since the original revelation and as they have been renewed by Christianity, in terms of their spirit. What then do the words 'consecrate' and 'initiate' mean? It means that the spiritual world is lowered over something earthly, so that one beholds this earthly thing as enveloped by the spiritual world. If we want to draw this symbolically, we could do so in the following way (it is drawn on the board). I attach great importance to making this quite clear to you. Let us take for example an ancient Near Eastern mystery. There was, let us say, the sixth degree of the “sun hero”, the seventh degree of the “father”. What does that mean? Well, if this figure represents a person of the sixth degree, his dignity meant that which descended from above and enveloped him from above. He walked around as an earthly man, but for his followers he represented not what was created by the earth, but what is created by the sun, that is, by the spiritual sun. “To consecrate” therefore means to take something away from the earth. The robe worn by the priest, if it is to be regarded as consecrated, envelops, as it were, the earthly personality; the person wearing the robe belongs to the spiritual world. There is only one exception to this, which of course was not yet present when the Persian mysteries were instituted and performed, and that is the following: In the older mysteries you will find everywhere that the act of consecration consists in calling down a heavenly being upon an earthly one. That which is impressed upon the earthly being is not present on earth. The only exception was Jesus Christ, who was present on earth and who, when celebrating Holy Communion, did not say what an old initiated priest would have said: I offer the bread as the body of the heavenly spirit, I offer the wine as the blood of the heavenly spirit. - He would, of course, have clothed it somewhat differently, because he could not have said “body” and “blood”, but “etheric body”, “etheric current” or the like, words that can no longer be heard today, but which were possible at that time in the sacred language. The only exception is what was said by Christ at the institution of the Lord's Supper: “This is my body, this is my blood.

This is radically opposed to all earlier acts of consecration. If you look at the acts of consecration of earlier times, you will have to say to yourself that these acts of consecration were based on the possibility of unearthly events having an effect on earthly events; they were therefore magical. When Christ Jesus came to Earth, He became a human being among humans, and the consequence of this is that the relationship of confession and trust in Christ Jesus now has a power that previously only existed in magical power. Thus, a human consecration ceremony is now possible, which simply begins with the words: “Let us worthily accomplish the human consecration ceremony out of the revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to Christ's deed.” An old priest would have had to say: “Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man in the revelation of extraterrestrial spirituality, in the worship of extraterrestrial spirituality, in devotion to extraterrestrial spirituality.” One must be aware of this; then one comes to feel and experience the Trinity correctly, in the Christian sense, and this is to be expressed in the relay prayer, which is then the continuation in the worthy preparation. You will see from each sentence that there is a struggle for a correct understanding of the Trinity.

I have already pointed out to you that the Gospel of John is basically not understood correctly by most theologians, because the Father God is called the “Creator” and Christ, the Logos, merely the “Savior”. But the Gospel of John expressly states: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. — The active, productive, actual Creator in the world is the Son of God, not the Father, so that the Trinity formula must express the confession of the Son of God as the Creator. God the Father must be felt as the underlying substance of all, as the underlying being of all; he must be felt in the sentence “God the Father be in us,” as the Son of God, who came to earth through Christ, is correctly understood by: “The Son of God creates in us”. This is simply the correct understanding in the sense of the Gospel of John, and such a correct understanding of the Trinity must be striven for at the beginning of every reading of the Mass.

In the consciousness of our humanity, we feel the divine Father.

There is an immediate indication of the sense of being with this “we feel the divine Father”.

He is in all that we are.

He is the underlying substance of everything.

Our substance is his substance. Our being is his being. He walks in us through all existence.

Thus, the Being in the Father is that which must be brought to consciousness. Then one proceeds to the confession of the Son-God:

In the experience of Christ in our humanity, we feel the divine Son. He reigns as the Spirit-Word through the world. He creates in everything we create. Our being is His creation.

Therefore, in so far as there is creation in us, we have come into being through the Word just as everything else has, for apart from the Word nothing of what has come into being has been created.

Our life is his creative life. He creates through us in all spiritual endeavors.

Once you have properly absorbed this into your consciousness, you can develop the right relationship with the Spirit God, the third aspect of the Godhead.

In the grasping of the spirit by our humanity, we feel the healing God. May He shine as the spirit-light through the world. May He shine in everything we behold. May our beholding be imbued with His spirit-light. May our recognition accept Him into His spirit-shining life in a pleasing way. He spiritualizes everything in our human soul.

We have seen, by first bringing the Act of Consecration of Man before our soul as a test, that the words “Christ in you” are often repeated, whereupon the acolyte says: “And fill your spirit, O Lord”. The priest turns to the congregation, and it is immediately understandable what is to be done with the pronouncing of the word “Christ in you”. As the altar server stands before the priest as the representative of the congregation, he is, so to speak, the one who indicates where the earthly plan, the earthly level begins. He speaks for the community, and the words “And may your spirit be filled” are not an order from the community, nor a wish of the community; when the words are spoken in the subjunctive, they signify that which actually comes from the community. Do you now understand the whole context and the subjunctive? What does the priest represent? The priest is only the one who represents the spirit of community within himself. In what does this spirit of community prevail in his body? In the believers who are there, in the participants of the Ecclesia. So what the community says through the altar boy is: Christ fill your spirit, the spirit of the community. Thus it is a matter of the community spirit of the congregation; it is diverted from the human and directed to the spiritual. “And may He fill your spirit.” You just have to understand this word in its subjunctive mood in the right way. Such things are quite important, and there must be an awareness of them.

When this preparation is over, the reading of the Gospel can begin in the manner indicated. The reading of the Gospel is, after all, the proclamation of the word of God by the Priest. The Catholic Church also inserts the so-called “Gloria” before the Gospel on feast days. It is entirely in the right spirit of spiritual intention that you take as little account as possible – in fact none at all – of what has only come about over time from the Roman Catholic Mass sacrifice. The progression over the course of the year must also be marked by the fact that the most important sections of the Gospel are read to the community during the year, so that, in a sense, the Gospel is divided up and the whole process from the birth of Christ to the Ascension is developed through the reading of the Gospel over the course of the year, although it is certainly possible to use one or the other Gospel. The most correct thing to do is to start at the Feast of the Nativity, at Christmas, by reading the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and then, by Christmas, to have progressed so far that, during the year, the Gospel has been covered by reading the Mass.

Regarding the further progress of the Mass, it should be noted that after transubstantiation has taken place and Communion is still to come, then the right place in the Mass is to interrupt the ritual that we read three days ago on a trial basis and insert the Lord's Prayer. Indeed, in recent times there has been a great deal of laxity in all denominations with regard to the Lord's Prayer. Originally, the Lord's Prayer is actually a compendium of the most important truths in the world, reflected through human feeling. In the Protestant confession, the Lord's Prayer is said in a way that is, I would say, not always sufficiently prepared. Just think of the solemnity of saying the Lord's Prayer when transubstantiation has preceded and the Lord's Prayer is inserted at this point. I am not saying that the Lord's Prayer should not be recited by the faithful as often as possible. But even the simplest individual prayer, such as the Lord's Prayer, is recited more reverently by the faithful - despite all the errors of the Roman Catholic Church - by the fact that the Roman Catholic hears the Lord's Prayer at an important point in the mass. This gives the whole mood in which the Lord's Prayer is prayed a certain solemn nuance. However, the Catholic Church has thoroughly dispelled this solemn nuance among the faithful by telling the penitent during confession, when a penitent has confessed his sins to the confessor, to say five Our Fathers every day as penance. This bartering of sin for the recitation of the Lord's Prayer is, of course, a terrible thing and desecrates the sacred character that the Lord's Prayer takes on during Mass and which helps it always retain its solemn tone. What the Catholic Church achieves in this respect, by speaking in Latin, a language that is incomprehensible to the faithful, can be replaced by the force with which the Lord's Prayer is spoken, because merely reciting the Lord's Prayer does not actually correspond to the grandeur of the Lord's Prayer. Although there should not be the slightest tendency to create a sense that something bordering on magic is being done – the Catholic Church has achieved this through the Latin language – it should be said that the Latin language, in a certain respect, also proves to be non-magical when it comes to nuancing the profound truths of the Lord's Prayer, which should never become trivial. It is true that there is a certain justification for the continued use of the Latin language for certain purposes that were intended to steer humanity away from the personal. But today, what could be given by the Latin language in the Lord's Prayer must be replaced by the power of speaking when praying the Lord's Prayer in front of the community. The believer must hear the Lord's Prayer during the cultic action, precisely because it is his daily prayer, in a way that goes beyond the ordinary measure of language. The Latin language has, after all, recreated the Lord's Prayer in such a way that it is, in a certain sense, a mantram:

Oremus. Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere:

Pater noster, qui es in coelis:
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also forgive those who owe us debts.
And lead us not into temptation.
But deliver us from evil.

Something must be transferred back from the Latin Lord's Prayer, which already exists in a mantric way, to the Lord's Prayer when it is prayed at the point between transubstantiation and communion during Mass. We will include these things in the Mass at the next Mass rehearsal.

Each of you will read the mass. This expresses what makes each of the priests the same as the other priest before the spiritual world. It is the highest form of democracy in spirit. Thus, what takes place in the spiritual through the formation of the community is fulfilled with the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the sense of Christianity, the ordination of a priest is actually the only form of initiation. The other religious communities that are not directly Christian, especially the old religious communities, had the degrees, the degrees within the spiritual hierarchy. In a certain sense, such degree initiations can still be introduced today; they have a good purpose. However, they cannot be introduced within a Christian community led by a Christian priesthood. Therefore, what are higher levels in the Christian priesthood are to be understood differently than as higher degrees. As priests, all stand equal. But what must enter into the church are human conditions. Within human conditions, we need a hierarchy of offices; so that where a Christian community is based on properly understood worship, “leadership” and “senior leadership” and so on relate to the order of communities on earth. This must be very carefully distinguished. The Catholic Church has not understood how to make this distinction in the right way, otherwise it should not have regarded, for example, the confirmation as a monopoly of the episcopal dignity. Every priest should be able to administer confirmation. Strict views must prevail in these matters. You see the stricter views sometimes peeping through in history, but at the same time you see confusion in history.

Our time is so far advanced in the development of mankind that you, my dear friends, cannot afford to allow confusion in this direction. For example, you will have to be very strict about the following: If we do things in such a way that a priest appears among us first as an ordained priest and he ordains the others, then in terms of ordination they all become equal to him. If he is also a superior, there is nothing superior in his conferring the ordination on the others. He confers the ordination on the others because he has already become a priest. But what is added is that with the ordination the priest is at the same time installed in office, and that is an earthly act; it is, if I may use a profane word, an administrative act; that must be added. Thus, for example, one can say: Since the one who is appointed as the highest arbiter also has an overview of how the individual priests who are to be ordained are used, it is simplest if he performs the ordinations at the same time, but as a priest he performs the ordination to the priesthood, and as the highest arbiter he establishes the office. This is reflected in history in the famous Investiture Controversy, where the way historians talk about it reveals something terribly confusing, while the distinction between secular office, secular office and incorporation into a spiritual order must be observed. It was simply not possible to properly distinguish between the conferral of the priestly dignity and the conferral of the office. You will see that if the correct understanding of these things takes hold among you from the very beginning, then you will have created a kind of cement for all your connections that would otherwise be lacking.

What I would still like to say today with regard to the reading of the Mass is that the simplicity of the four main parts should be maintained and that insertions should only be made on the most important annual feasts and on certain other occasions, which we will discuss in the next few days. So, of course, a Christmas mass must contain something special in the parts that are not the main parts, as must a Easter mass, a Pentecost mass and a mass that is said for a dead person or a mass that is seen as a somehow otherwise intended celebration.

That is what I wanted to tell you today.

Due to Dr. Rittelmeyer's indisposition, we are only able to discuss the ceremony today that we would otherwise have completed. It is in the nature of things that, as long as not all the equipment and robes are in place, we cannot do some things in full. But that is not the main thing either; for us, the main thing is that the spirit should prevail in what we accomplish here, and so today I would like to give you a kind of preliminary discussion of it.

It is, after all, a ceremony that is to take place for each individual in front of the entire audience; and if I am to present the meaning of this ceremony, I must say that these ceremonies, which we perform step by step, signify the gradual becoming a priest. Today would be the first stage of contemplation. It should be noted first of all that in the cultus that will be incumbent upon you, the sacrifice of man's consecration forms the center everywhere, so that everything always tends back to the sacrifice of man's consecration. You must be aware that in the modern conception of religion, the more external conception of man's consecration is the usual one. There one actually grasps the Act of Consecration of Man only as an after-effect of the Lord's Supper, which Christ Jesus practiced with his disciples, while the Mass, the Act of Consecration of Man, is basically a continuous event that flows from the Mystery of Golgotha. For in the proclamation of the gospel, in the sacrifice, in the transubstantiation, in the communion lie all the spiritual events - expressed through external cultic acts - which are a continuation, a perpetuation of the working of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now, every truly Christian activity should be connected to and placed within the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, it is quite natural that the human sacrifice includes everything that otherwise happens within the Christian community. In a sense, the human sacrifice is the envelope for everything that happens validly. This also applies to the ordination of priests. One could say that one celebrates a Mass in which the ordination of a priest is included, of which the ordination of a priest is a component. For this Mass is based on this four-part structure of Gospel reading, offertory, transubstantiation and communion, and within these parts the most diverse acts of consecration can now take place, including the ordination of a priest. So that when the priestly ordination is complete, one has said a mass that in its own substance contained the priestly ordination. The human consecration sacrifice must also be understood in this sense. It encompasses everything. It encompasses all the mysteries of Christianity in a spiritual but real presence.

And so the first part of the consecration would be to begin in the way that has already been shown before you, in front of the altar with the relay prayer:

Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man out of the Revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to the deed of Christ.

May the Father-God be in us
The Son-God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

If the consecration had already begun today, it would be necessary for Rittelmeyer to receive it from the spiritual world, so to speak, directly through my mediation; he would then pass it on to the others. So Dr. Rittelmeyer would have been sitting here, facing the altar. I would have received from the spiritual world, as it were, what would otherwise have been performed in person. From the second part onward, everything is performed in person. One of the guides would have ministered.

[Now the Act of Consecration of Man is read aloud up to the Gospel, combined with the words of the ordination (see pages 53ff. and the facsimiles on pages 97-99, as well as GA 343, page 414f.), then:]

The celebrant: It is now proclaimed for the first time, out of this Spirit, through your mouth, the Gospel of John in the first chapter.

The ordinand then reads the Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word...” to “...has become the leader in this vision.”

The celebrant: We lift up our soul to You, O Christ.

The one to be consecrated: The words of the Gospel extinguish whatever is impure in our words.

My dear friends! That would be the essential content of the first part of the consecration. The second part would follow when the Credo is spoken and the Offertory is spoken, immediately before the Transubstantiation. We will then, when the matter can become real, transfer the consecration first to Rittelmeyer, and then Rittelmeyer will transfer it to the others. In this way we will make the process a real one.

We will leave it at that for today.

[The stenographer only recorded parts of this meeting.]

Rudolf Steiner: Tomorrow, we will need the candelabrum and the picture of Christ again for the ceremony. As you (turning to Friedrich Rittelmeyer) carry out the ceremony, you will also become immersed in it. Today, what was presented yesterday should be repeated so that you are immersed in it to begin with, and then I will be able to continue the ceremony. It is not to be completed today, but we will see that it can be taken a stage further. Tomorrow we will need: a censer, the two pictures of Christ, then the oil and the two water jugs with a tray and the chalice. We can form bread. We should have that tomorrow.

Today I will try to get everything out of my mind for the time being, and no one needs to think that the ceremony is not complete because some things that are connected to it are still missing. Dr. Rittelmeyer will figure out the rest. I already explained yesterday how the whole ceremony is to be thought. It is not possible – it has been weighing heavily on my mind – to perform the ordination in the simple way [suggested last year]; [we will perform it as] it has now been revealed from the spiritual world. And so I will carry out [the beginning] to a certain extent, and then Dr. Rittelmeyer can continue the ceremony under my assistance tomorrow.

The first thing will be for you to provide the vestments here; the first task is to consecrate the vestments themselves, so that they may appear suitable for the purpose for which they will serve. In this case, I will try to invoke the blessing upon them.

In the name of the Father of God, who is in us,
In the name of the Son of God, who works in us,
In the name of the Holy Ghost, who enlightens us:
The power that should be in all the work of those
who have dedicated themselves to the divine service here,
the power of Christ is symbolized by these robes.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer is now given his robe and alb, and Gerirud Spörri his vestment.

Now the first part of the Act of Consecration of Man is read [in the expanded form for priestly ordination, as had already been indicated the previous day. During this, Friedrich Ritielmeyer is given the stole. After that, he reads the Gospel of John 1:1-14.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear Friends! We have completed the first part of the consecration ritual. Since the consecration ritual will not be completed today, it will be possible to carry out the second part here in spirit without actually performing the ceremony, and this should now follow on from the first part. I am entitled to assume that a fully valid act will now be carried out.

[Rudolf Steiner now reads the offertory (see CW 343, page 416 ff.), combined with the words of the ordination (see the facsimile on page 100), during which Friedrich Rittelmeyer is given the surplice.]

Rudolf Steiner: Having spoken the word that gives strength, I empower you with the symbol of the reading of the Act of Consecration of Man.

[Rudolf Steiner hands the chasuble to Pastor Dr. Rittelmeyer. The following words are spoken three times: “The Father-God...”]

Rudolf Steiner: This completes the second part of the act of consecration. The person to be consecrated has thus received the power to read with full justification the part of the mass that has just been read up to this point. And tomorrow the consecration of the next of you will have to be done by the one who has just been consecrated, and the one who has just been consecrated will receive the completion of the consecration at the end of the sacrifice of the mass tomorrow. Then tomorrow he will perform the act of consecration, and the consecration of the shepherds of souls will gradually be carried out in stages.

The next step is to continue in such a way that transubstantiation is now celebrated, that after transubstantiation the Paternoster is prayed, and after praying the Paternoster, before Communion, the third part of the priestly ordination will be performed tomorrow on the newly ordained. But tomorrow we will first perform the further ordinations, and for each one the ordination will be completed in the same way. So after the one ordained today has received the ordination in full, he will in turn continue the ordination for the others, so that the complete ordination as a pastor of souls will be carried away by each of you from here.

That is what I wanted to do with you today. Now we will conclude the ceremony so that our dear Dr. Rittelmeyer can recover a little. Tomorrow at a quarter to three.

There follows the answering of a few questions by Rudolf Steiner.

— The person performing the consecration must wear the robe.

— The oil that has just been used can be stored in such a way that it remains for this purpose and is not used for anything else or even poured away.

— We can use ordinary bread. - A goblet could be used, a chalice-like glass, simple white glass, which is a bit wide at the bottom.

— Squeezing ripe grapes? An eighth of a liter may suffice. Only a few drops are needed. Ripe grapes are just right.

— It takes only one to be ordained, and he can pass on the ordination. Anyone ordained a priest can pass on the ordination.

— They must have the opportunity to perform the cult at all times.

— The ceremony performed after the prayer for the relay must be for each individual, as must the ceremony with anointing after the offertory.

— The act of consecration itself is inserted as often as there are candidates for ordination. The Mass is celebrated as far as the Gospel reading, then the sequence of actions following the Gospel as the actual act of consecration is performed in such a way that everyone reads the Gospel. The offertory is then completed, followed by the brief act of consecration with the anointing.

On the following pages, the words of the ordination are given in Rudolf Steiner's handwriting (reduced in size).

[Record of participants: In the presence of Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Rittelmeyer celebrates the complete human consecration ritual for the first time. Marta Heimeran ministers. During this consecration, Rittelmeyer simultaneously completes the consecration of the first twelve priests. Thus the first 13 original priests are ordained.]

Rudolf Steiner: The first Act of Consecration of Man has been performed here. From this first Holy Act of Consecration of Man may there truly proceed all the power of the word, all the power of the deed and all the power of healing that is to come, my dear friends, through the community that you are founding as a whole, through the communities that you will found as individuals. You must realize the full significance and importance of this fact. You must bear in mind that the Catholic Church, which regards itself as the only legitimate church, traces its authority to properly perform such a human consecration ceremony back to only one historical tradition, namely, that those who perform it have always been consecrated by others who in turn have been consecrated by others, and so on up through all the centuries to the event of Golgotha. And the first consecrator was the Christ Himself, who performed the Act of Consecration of Man with His Apostles. The Catholic Church traces the authority to perform the Act of Consecration of Man back to this apostolic succession.

The Protestant Church has abandoned the performance of this Act of Consecration of Man, and in so doing has laid the seeds of atomization and worldliness and confined itself to the teaching of an unreal act of consecration. Therefore, everything that cannot take place without a real act of consecration cannot take place through the Protestant Church either. The Catholic Church, however, has externalized the living power that is in the Act of Consecration of Man by objectifying the church, and the priest, within the celebration, actually merely presents himself as a bearer of what magically takes place within the Act of Consecration of Man. Thus, everything that takes place in the Protestant Church is actually taken away from what Christ Jesus instituted. Christ Jesus is made the only world teacher, the only teacher of humanity who has descended from divine heights, but He is not revered as the One who inaugurated an act in the Mystery of Golgotha that continues to be effective through all subsequent earthly circles. For this continuation of the deed inaugurated with the Mystery of Golgotha is, after all, the essential thing that underlies the externalized thing, which the Catholic Church has as apostolic succession. So one can say that the Protestant Church has indeed worked with good forces for a long time. But from the signs that have entered into this present time and that have led you, my dear friends, to seek a revival of religious life from within this church, it is clear that the Protestant Church, if it does not seek a renewal of Christian life by taking up what is alive in the Act of Consecration of Man, proceeding from the Mystery of Calvary and being fulfilled in all further earthly circles, the Protestant Church is in danger of completely running into the Luciferic event.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church has long since exposed itself to this danger [of becoming Ahrimanized] by externalizing the cult, which is not supported by the real flow of the power emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha. By rejecting the knowledge of the real spiritual solar power descending from the spiritual cosmos, by rejecting that which even the Catholic Church has before it in the Symbolum, the Catholic Church has long since exposed itself to the Ahrimanization of everything in its cult. The Catholic Church included the monstrance, the Blessed Sacrament, in its symbols. You see, when you look at the monstrance, the Blessed Sacrament, quite clearly the reproduction of the sun. You see in that which is left out in the middle of the radiant sun and what receives the core of the sun, the consecrated body of Christ. You see the moon at the foot of this consecrated body of Christ. You see Sol and Luna in the Sanctissimum, which, after all, is supposed to fulfill the beginning and the end of the Mass with a blessing during particularly solemn masses. But you see at the same time that this connection of Christ with the cosmos, which is even presented to Christianity in the Symbolum at the Missa solemnis, is no longer felt and experienced in its liveliness. That is the Verahrimanization.

All this, my dear friends, passed through my soul when, according to your will, I had to pluck up the courage to bring to you once more, directly from the spiritual worlds, what has actually been lost, as a ritual act, as a human consecration ritual.

Accept it as requested, longed for and brought down from the spiritual realms, and continue to perform it in the spirit of your own consecration by filling yourselves with the consciousness that was to be generated in your souls, to be strengthened in your hearts, to enter into your will in a healing way. Accept it and fulfill it by virtue of your own act of consecration. Every human consecration ceremony that you perform in the future shall be a repetition of this first human consecration ceremony, which itself, through the power of Christ invoked into that which we have celebrated today, should be an aftereffect of the institution of the human consecration ceremony through the word, the power, the will of Christ.

May God the Father be in us
The Son-God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

The altar server: Yes, let it be so.

My dear friends! I would just like to make a few introductory remarks today. It is the case that there are some things that take place in the context of worship and then carry over into teaching that really need to be clearly distinguished. There are also some things that we simply need to know and that we need to address in the right way based on our knowledge. For example, it is necessary for you to bear in mind that the way we have performed the human sacrifice so far has been the foundation and framework for the ordination of priests, for the consecration of the shepherd of souls. And it is a prerequisite that is actually self-evident at this moment of founding your community, but which will not always remain such a self-evident one in the course of your work. This matter of course arises out of your will to found such a community, and this will is inspired by the fact that there is an anthroposophical movement that presents certain facts — not views, but facts — from the spiritual world to people. It was the realization of the world of facts presented to the world by the anthroposophical movement that prompted you to join a movement like yours. Well, in that lies something of what can be called a “credo”. When we speak of a spiritual movement, the credo must, of course, be understood in the broadest sense, and the credo is actually already contained in your decision, according to what I have just said. It was precisely in your work together in Breitbrunn that you considered whether or not you agreed with this credo, which I would call an inner understanding. And it was out of this agreement that the

In so far as the Act of Consecration of Man provides the framework for the consecration of the soul shepherd, it cannot, of course, contain the Credo. For it is only by being imbued with the Credo that the soul shepherd approaches the desire for consecration and brings with him the will to consecrate, the will that is, which is substantially permeated by this Credo. Therefore, the ordination is based on an Act of Consecration of Man, which is performed from the standpoint that it arises from the will of those who either already stand within the ministry of the soul or will stand within it in the next moment. The community, the lay community, which should definitely be present at the consecration of the shepherds of souls and must also be present later, is actually only a spectator and recipient of the message that one or more new shepherds of souls have been appointed from the spiritual world. Thus, at this consecration of soul-shepherds, it is something other than it usually is. Therefore, this must be understood in an exact way: that the celebrant at the consecration of soul-shepherds is indeed a soul-shepherd and stands within the currents of the spiritual world, in which he is meant to stand. He is the priest from the beginning to the end of the Act of Consecration of Man and so wears the full regalia of the priesthood throughout the entire Act of Consecration. The Act of Consecration of Man was and had to be performed in this form for the ordination of priests.

You can see from this that the moment the Act of Consecration of Man is performed for the laity, whether for the living or for the dead, it is something different. Here the priest stands as the representative of the spiritual spirit of the entire community, including the lay community, and as such he must feel. He approaches the altar first as a priest, so that the community may look up to the world of spiritual existence, and he performs the Act of Consecration of Man by first introducing the mass and leading up to the gospel reading, that is, to the point: “So may Your word live worthily on my lips and, carried by Your Spirit, penetrate to those to whom it is to be proclaimed.” From that point on, the priest has to empathize with the will and mind of the congregation. What does that mean? It means that something must be expressed and revealed in the outward form. Therefore, at this moment he takes off the chasuble and keeps the crossed stole over the alb and then speaks the opening words of the Gospel reading: “Thy blessing, O Christ, flow living through the word” and so on. He is now indeed the pastor of souls, but he is so immersed in the spirit of the community that he speaks out of this community spirit: “Thy blessing, O Christ, stream livingly through the word” and so on. Thus he reads the Gospel, he reads it to the end, and so it remains up to the words: “The word of the Gospel blot out what lives uncleanly in our words.”

This is the point at which the word of God is followed by the word of man in the form of the creed – you will not misunderstand this expression. So at this point the creed follows as a response to the word of God. Therefore, when the priest moves on to the Credo, he removes his stole, or he has it removed by an altar server, and now he says the Credo only in the Alba, or at a solemn service, a cope is then put on; but that is not necessary, the Credo, which is spoken as the response of human beings to God, can perfectly well be said in the Alba. After the Credo has been spoken, and has thus been spoken by the priest out of the community, the priestly act in the celebration of the offertory only begins again with the putting on of the stole and chasuble. In this way you see how the Credo must become thoroughly incorporated into the Act of Consecration of Man as an act for human beings. It must therefore be left out when the Mass is performed for those who are already priests or for those who will become priests in the next moment.

Now the point of the Credo is that the human being must first become fully clear about how he relates to the Credo itself. Therefore, the Credo is also the part of the Act of Consecration of Man where there is, as it were, an interim period, a pause. In the Mass, God speaks to man... [gap in the stenographer's notes]. But in the Credo, it is the human confession; man speaks to God. And the point is that there is already the external possibility of formulating the Credo in the most diverse ways and saying from the community in which sense one actually professes the divine word, in what strength of soul one will take it up, and so on. However, in a certain sense, this must also be understood historically. Historically, things present themselves somewhat differently than for the spiritual view. The original credo, which has been tried to be restored in our credo and from which our credo only differs in that today, of course, what has occurred in the development of humanity since the old credo was written must be included, namely the development of self-awareness. This old credo is absolutely spiritually inviolable. When it arose on earth, there were still people who were able to understand the actual meaning of this credo inwardly and for whom it would have been foolish to discuss this credo. It would be a bit like discussing whether or not an elephant has two teeth coming out of its mouth. It would have been a great folly to do so at the time when the creed was being formulated. Already in the time of Athanasius, the lack of understanding of those regions of human existence begins, which would have to be understood if one wants to keep the Credo free of certain things. Of course, from the point of view of the external historian, it looks different. He says that the old Credo originated at a childlike stage of humanity, and that today it should be shaped in such a way that it contains understanding. Such an opinion underlies all discussions about the Credo. From the standpoint of spiritual science, the matter appears as follows: at the time of the Arthanasius-Arius controversy something had already entered into evolution, whereby, with regard to the understanding of the Credo, something like spiritual darkness occurred, and therein lay the cause of the discussions about the Credo. One can therefore say that the discussions about the Credo mean that people no longer understood it in a truly spiritual sense. There is no point in discussing this when things are viewed from within. And even if the Credo is spoken in Latin, the possibility of developing a higher understanding ceases with the translation; and we have something in front of us in the Credo that should be judged with understanding, not after discussion. Everything that is discussed in relation to the Credo has already been misunderstood. And in any case, it cannot be a matter of leaving something out, because even such an omission would show that there is a lack of understanding.

So it is that the Catholic Church has retained only the sequence of words in the Creed, while excluding the inner spirit of the matter altogether. This is something that must be reintroduced through your movement. You must understand the Creed in this sense.

Then we will now complete the ordination for all and immediately follow it with something that is developing as a foundation for the confession that will continue to flow through the movement you want to found. For this creed is, of course, to be represented by this movement of yours. The anthroposophical movement represents it, of course, albeit immanently. But the point will be to hold a short conference to clarify how the creed is to be represented. The Act of Consecration of Man provides the basis for there to be a creed at all; and in the act of worship one does not move in the sphere where people confess or do not confess something, but where something is depicted. For in the face of acts of worship, discussions would not only mean what a discussion about the elephant's teeth would mean in the physical-sensual realm, but such a discussion would be the same as saying: I am of the opinion that the elephant has a false brain that must be changed. - So we come, by coming to the Credo, not only into the history of its original foundation, but already into its continuation. We must bring this to our consciousness.

The answers to individual questions follow.

A participant: What about singing the Mass?

Rudolf Steiner: Today it is wrong to sing the mass, today it must be spoken because the inner consciousness must come in; the meaning must be grasped through it. It is also an Ahrimanization that the Catholic Church continues to sing the mass in the old way. However, this is not done for all parts, but for certain parts, for example in the Paternoster. These are things that should not be allowed to continue, because they make the Mass seem suggestive. The “Ite missa est” in the Catholic Mass must be sung. Now it often happens in the Catholic Church that a bishop who cannot sing celebrates Mass. Then another, the next one, has to stand in front of him and sing for him. If this is a canon, for example, who is an older gentleman and also cannot sing, then someone else has to stand in for him, so that it may happen that three or four stand in a row, of whom only the first can sing.

A participant asks a question about reading the gospels. [The stenographer did not record the wording of the question.]

Rudolf Steiner: One could read the gospel only up to the words “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” These words should be spoken at the ordination to the priesthood.

My dear friends! Today I shall attempt to add to the ceremonies that you are to introduce when you take up your new offices as soul-care givers and shepherds, something that you can regard as a first instruction, so to speak, a priestly sermon, as it has been given in all times when people knew the right thing to do in these matters, and as it must be given today, so that you may grasp in the right sense what has now been done to you through the ceremonial act and what is to be done through you in the future. Today, we should make a special effort to allow the full meaning of this ceremony, which was essentially woven into the Mass, to take effect on our soul. And since it is woven into the Mass, it should always be repeated when you yourself celebrate Mass before the community.

The point is that the Creation before us is completely new and yet is one that is to fit into the whole earthly context of the evolution of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha; and so again, as the Mystery of Golgotha itself has been placed in the overall evolution of the earth since its primeval beginning, so it is in turn compelled to take into account the evolving time. But for you, this means nothing other than taking into you the impulse of the time, insofar as the Christian impulse, the Christ impulse, lives in this time impulse precisely for the immediate present. It is indeed the case that in the immediate present this Christ impulse lives very particularly. You must realize that, especially with regard to what is to be transferred into your outer activity, you are doing many things differently than they were done in the older times of Christianity, when Christianity had not yet become Roman Catholic, when it still had an impact from the spiritual mystery knowledge with which the Christ impulse was received on earth in the first centuries. So you have to renew some of it and bring it into the present in its renewed form, so that it can continue to have an effect in the future.

Above all, you must understand that the languages in which Christianity was spread in the first centuries had a kind of sanctity. In the Near East, these languages were a Syrian dialect that still had an ancient flavor, the Greek language, and the Latin language. In fact, Christianity was first proclaimed to mankind in these three languages. So it can be said that those who either knew the apostles personally or at least were in the places from which the apostles preached and could still report on it, that they saw the apostle disciples and knew them face , that they recognized it as correct, that the gospel was proclaimed and the ceremonies were performed in the old Near Eastern Syrian dialect, in Greek and in Latin. Now we must be clear about the fact that in the course of human development everything undergoes a metamorphosis and that the essence of this Syrian dialect, which at that time had come from even older formations of spiritual development, was not used in the ceremonies but only in the sermon, where, of course, the territorial languages were used, that the essence of this dialect and of the Greek and Latin languages was that the Logos Himself was working in them. There was something in them that passed from the waves of language into the celebrant. This is something you should understand very deeply, that something was transferred from the structure of the language, from the formation of the language into the celebrant. And for those who were truly fervent as believers, it was the case that through the reciting of the Mass – for it was an old recitative in which the Mass was spoken; today it is called “singing” but it is not singing in the modern sense) — a power was also transferred to them, which today may no longer be transferred from person to person, because these powers counted on a certain elimination of the ego impulse in the person. Something passed directly from person to person that had a suggestive character, and today, if we want to renew Christianity in the right way, we have to transfer this into a completely different way of treating these things. That suggestive understanding, which was transmitted to the ancients by their presence when it was spoken suggestively, and which even brought forth from these fervent souls that they could see Christ in His presence when transubstantiation took place, must be conveyed in something that must be much more inward for today's time. And precisely for this reason, we may also give what has been expressed in the old language to the immediate present in a renewed language. And that is what we have done.

In doing so, we have first of all done something that shows in a very special way that, if we are to understand the Christ impulse in the present correctly, we must disregard the mere dead Christ and be aware that we must first find the spiritual relationship to the word spoken in the ceremony through our inner soul life, that relationship that originally existed with speech in a way in which the human being himself had less to do with. Today we are obliged to gradually achieve in our souls, through constant activation of this connection with the Christ impulse, that which is also to be achieved in this new form of speech and which can also be achieved if the Act of Consecration to Man is celebrated in the right way. It is my task today to bring about this transformation in the treatment of the Christian sacrificial act, and I would like to do this as vividly as possible in the following way.

Let us take the order of the Mass at the beginning. We need only imagine how, in older times, those feelings were awakened that were directly linked to the memory of Christ's appearance on earth. The Catholic Church still renews this in an external way in the order of the Mass that it celebrates at Christmas. The beginning of the Christmas Mass should be brought forward – not, of course, in the old recitative, which would actually be a sacrilege for more recent times, but in the way it can be done at present – so that we can vividly develop what can come before your souls today. You will recognize what you now have to do yourselves, but in a slightly different way.

Rudolf Steiner reads a Latin text from the Catholic Mass ritual. [The stenographer did not record which passage it was.]

In this language, we have something that should have an immediate effect on the faithful, in that the priest, by intoning the language, came into a direct connection with the spiritual, which always flows and weaves through language. We have now outgrown this undulating and weaving in language by raising ourselves in thought with self-awareness, and we must all live in this realization if we want to establish in the right way what we have in mind. In the older churches, intonation was very important, and the Catholic Church has retained this.

But as a result of this, in contrast to the development of modern times, in which the spirit of Christ should prevail directly in the Mass, it is in an Ahrimanic state of backwardness. Because of this Ahrimanic backwardness, in which the Catholic Church has remained by simply preserving what once was, it could never

never bring about that the Act of Consecration of Man becomes what it should become in our time. And if you want to implement what you want to implement in the right way, then you have to place yourselves in the evolution of the present in such a way that something is experienced by the souls again, just as the glory of Christ appeared before the eyes of the fervent souls during transubstantiation, so that the question of whether or not Christ was present in the sacrifice of the Mass could not arise. The theories and philosophies about transubstantiation only arose after this time, when those who were truly fervent souls could simply be asked: Did you see that Christ was on the altar? And many said, “Yes!” and the others had faith.

Our actions must be a preparation for what must happen in the future. And when you approach the community in the right way with the regenerated Mass, it will be able to work as I have just described. But then, above all, there must be a very deep and earnest understanding in your souls of what man's connection with Christ actually is in the immediate present and will become in the future. For you know that already in the first half of the twentieth century the Christ is to appear again for the seeing souls, whereas He was lost to the eyes of the souls because they lost the kind of seeing that I have just characterized and that made discussions about transubstantiation unnecessary. But people will have to do something to make this happen. The Christ is ready to walk visibly among men again in ethereal form, but men must do something for it. If you inaugurate and continue your movement in the right way, it will be able to happen through the power that lies in your Act of Consecration of Man and that passes over to the communities. Then you will have grasped what you are doing as something that is directly spiritually real. That is why I had to present to you today, at least briefly and vividly, what you have performed in the renewed, metamorphosed form as a mass cult in the last days.

Now it is a matter of what you accomplish in the right way being transferred to the community, because up to now you have done it for yourselves. Above all, it is important that you can properly place before your souls what is expressed as the mystery of Christianity in the third part of the letter to the Colossians, in the third verse. Today I would like to call this passage before your soul as it is really meant:

You have died, and your ego is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world; but when Christ, who bears your ego, has himself appeared before the vision, then you too will reveal yourselves with him.

There is an enormous depth hidden in these words. It was actually spoken for later times rather than for the time of the apostles. It is actually spoken for our time, so that our time understands it in the right way. For it is the case that in the earthly development of humanity until about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people experienced in their inner being that which could be of their true self in this inner being. In what they experienced within themselves, they simultaneously experienced something real of what had lived in them in their pre-earthly existence. One could not have said to these people: Become aware of something of your eternal spiritual-soul core!, because they simply had states of consciousness in which this eternal spiritual-soul core shone forth. They needed only self-knowledge, just as people today have knowledge of the soul; and by looking at themselves they perceived - without that distinct sense of self that only developed later - their lives before birth and after death. And so they could understand when the initiates spoke to them: “Your body dies; but what you experience within yourselves, you know will not die with you; that is alive, that remains alive.” — Death had no instrument to kill the human soul as well.

But what put the apostle in a different position was that, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, souls had begun to share in the fate of the body, and that souls [since that time] are in danger of sharing in the fate of the body. In ancient times, the soul did not share the fate of the body. Dying is part of the fate of the body, and the soul did not die with it. That was the very concrete conception in ancient times. This fact was later abstracted because people could not bear it in all its intensity. People did not want to admit to themselves that what has developed between birth and death under the constant urge of the ego consciousness no longer has a part in the eternal soul core of the human being, but has a part in the body and participates in the fate of the body, that it thus also dies. Above all, this was clear to the first Christians: that in the evolution of the earth, the time had come when the soul, although it acquires an ego on earth, dies with the body as a result. That the body dies was not what was said in the first gospel proclamations, but that the soul dies, and that it has already died in people who emerged from the pre-Christian evolution of the world. It was meant as a real word: You have died. Not the earlier souls had died, for then they had not yet shared in the fate of the body, but you belong to the fate of the generation of those who have died, that is, your souls share in the fate of the body; for that which you carry here as an ego consciousness through your physical body is only an image of your true ego. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, although people had looked into their own selves and had glimpsed this true self, it was not yet separate from the human being. During the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it was precisely this self that was separated from the human being, and the human being was raised into the spiritual world.

If we imagine what man experienced before the Mystery of Golgotha, he had his soul, in which he experienced the prenatal, and he had the real I, but he did not perceive it at first. After the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that man had his soul, but he no longer experienced the prenatal in it. Since that time, the true self is spiritual, that is, it does not belong to the earthly world, but to the spiritual world. This self is reflected in the physical body, the consciousness of self: “And your self is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world.”

He has now descended to earth so that this spiritual world can permeate the earthly world through him. But man's true self does not live in the world that can be seen with eyes and approached with the three ordinary faculties of thinking, feeling and willing; it lives in a world that has since that time permeated the earthly one, but it is united with Christ. And one can only know the true self by knowing the Christ at the same time; one can only feel the true self if one feels the essence of the Christ and the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha at the same time; one can only be imbued by the true self if one is imbued by the impulse that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha.

What could previously be taught through the ceremonies and rituals is something that you have to translate into a living spiritual life if your movement is to have meaning. But then you must realize that in our time everything is actually being done on the part of the Christ to show Himself to people together with the true human I, so that the word of the Apostle shall be fulfilled in our time:

You died, and your ego is separated from you and united with Christ in the spiritual world; but when Christ, who bears your ego, has come before the vision himself,

– as we can expect in the first half of our century –

then you too will reveal yourselves with him.

That means that then people will be able to walk around with the direct consciousness of the true self – not just with the image that is created by the physical body. And you shall make of them true Christians.

That is what you must make your task if you carry a substantial content with your movement. You must be clear about what it actually means: “With the newer times, more and more has arisen in humanity that man has come to his self-awareness. This does not initially mean an inner penetration with the true self. To arrive at self-awareness means a separation from the true self, an experiencing of oneself as coming from the true self. For this true self is one with the world of Christ. He brought this world of Christ into the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Today He waits to be seen again through the corresponding preparations [of human beings], to reveal Himself to people. Then it will be possible to endow self-awareness with the inner experience of the true self, and then the word from the Gospel will be fulfilled, which is found in this third chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians and is actually spoken for our time and : that you should first awaken in yourselves an understanding of the relationship of the true self to the Christ, so that you can then revive it through the Act of Consecration of Man in those laymen who are present at your Act of Consecration of Man. For by permeating yourselves with such an understanding of self-consciousness and its relations to the human world, of the Christ and his relations to the true human self, you will perform the human consecration ritual with the right feeling. And through feelings that can be stimulated in you by an understanding of these things, you will present to people a truth about the dying of the ego consciousness in the physical body, which is indeed a depressing truth for human beings, but also the uplifting truth of the salvation of the true human ego, in that the Christ can lead the ego through death. You will be so moved by the reception of such a truth that you will be able to enliven the Act of Consecration of Man through it and thus bring something before the faithful that must be understood differently than usual, that must be understood with the understanding of the spiritual world. And in doing so, you will not only perform the Act of Consecration of Man differently, but with an understanding of the spiritual world, so that the things that take place in transubstantiation can no longer be discussed, but will be seen and felt as a matter of course, in that it will be felt that something supersensible must be understood in the sensual. And because something supersensory is taking place in the sensory, it is superfluous to discuss it with the intellect.

That is the attitude with which you should approach the Mass before the people, and with this attitude you must permeate the Mass if it is to be celebrated in the right spirit before the members of your communities. I was obliged to add this as a first rule to the celebration of the Mass and to the celebration of the ordination of the pastoral care of souls. We will have to continue with such reflections for some time, because they are the foundations for what you will have to bring before the communities in words.

Now it would be good if you would discuss the things that are on your minds as long as I am still here.

A question has been raised about a formula for admission to the community and about the creed. [The exact wording of the question was not written down.]

Rudolf Steiner: The admission to the community will of course have to consist of a discussion between the person to be admitted and the person admitting them about the creed. Especially with regard to the creed, it cannot of course be demanded that it be immediately understood by the person to be admitted in the way it is presented in the formula, because on the whole we must continue to follow it in a certain sense of the old tradition. Even though we already have in our formula that which points to the right thing, we cannot change what has now been so shaped by historical development that actual admission into the community of Christians is effected through baptism, and it will also be impossible to perform baptism in any other way than as infant baptism. In this way you follow tradition on the one hand, but on the other hand you must be aware that this was of course not the custom in the early days of Christianity either. In those early days, one became a Christian by attending Mass – not as far as the Gospel, but as far as the first prayer, which I have called the “relay prayer” – and then was baptized. So one was baptized in the full consciousness that humanity had at that time. Actually, only adults were baptized, and those who were born of baptized parents were simply children of Christians, they were raised as Christians and were introduced to the baptismal act on the basis of this Christian education. This meant that those who were led to the baptismal ceremony had already been sufficiently introduced to the Christian creed through living with their Christian ancestors, and one could simply conduct a kind of exam with such candidates, whereby they were once again made aware of what they had experienced during their childhood in the company of older people. And so it happened; if they were found to be sufficiently grounded in Christian doctrine, they could be baptized. Admittedly, baptism was then a much more real act in the life of a person than it can be today. Today, in any case, we must continue to practice infant baptism for a long time to come. So we first accept the child into the community of Christians, but we omit from the infant baptism what belongs to the Mass. This is justified. Baptism is an act that takes place around the child in complete unconsciousness. And precisely for this reason, what confirmation is has been transformed so that today it stands in place of what originally was baptism and is simply postponed to the appropriate age. So with the person being admitted today, there will be, above all, a kind of discussion about what every person should actually understand of the creed. And if a formula is needed for this – and that seems to be the case from the question – then we can indeed draw up such a formula. But it could also develop in a free conversation. What should develop in free conversation with the person to be admitted, without a formula, would have to be the content that the person concerned can, I will not say, profess the real Christ to be equal to himself, but that he can develop a sufficient relationship to the real Christ when one speaks to him of this real Christ. From the way in which the person to be initiated perceives the way in which one speaks to him about the Christ, one must recognize whether he can really belong to the community. Whether or not someone should be accepted is, of course, entirely a matter of feeling. And then it will be a matter of the person to be accepted really learning to understand, at least in essence, the content of the Act of Consecration of Man. Even if it is not possible to really celebrate the Act of Consecration of Man everywhere, we will still have to make sure that even where we still have to hold back on anything cult-like, the inner content of the Act of Consecration of Man Consecration is brought home to the soul, so that one is always in a position to regard the Act of Consecration of Man as something that can be taken up in a sermon or in any theoretical discussion.

What is meant here can best be understood by saying the following. Think of the Protestant sermon. You will often have emphasized or heard emphasized how the Protestant sermon should not be merely a scientific or intellectual discussion, and most preachers today appreciate most about the sermon what is not intellectual at all, but what is emotional and spiritual. In fact, it is the case that in preaching, beyond everything intellectual, a spirituality radiates directly from the content of feeling and emotion. Even in our present-day de-divinized time, the Protestant preacher still tries to give people something spiritual with his sermon, and one can indeed experience good preaching in this sense. But what is left over from the cult in the Protestant Church is presented with a completely false pathos, even by good preachers. They immediately lose their role as speakers of spiritual matters when they come to celebrate, because they are no longer in the spiritual world. There is, of course, something right in the fact that the sermon should be inspired by the content of the soul, that it should speak to the heart and not to the mind. But because this, which is to happen through the sermon, is purchased through the exclusion of all knowledge about the spiritual world - which is still preserved in petrified dogmas - then such things come about as the assertion that one can approach what the Christian is supposed to experience by inserting foreign words into the language of those living today. It is a remarkable phenomenon – I have already drawn your attention to it today – how something spiritual still resides in the Latin language, which is no longer alive for today's man. Man today feels that the living language has been so transposed into the profane material that he no longer believes he can express anything supersensory with it. And even if he does not want a mass to be read in Latin – from which he can still discern what he should grasp in spirit – he would at least like to hear a single word that sounds fresh to him in his secular life, and so, for example, he would not just call the sacred a “sacred”, but a “numinoses” or something similar. Once again, something unknown and suggestive is introduced into that which, in the face of it, one is powerless to truly reach with the soul. Today, books are being written about the sacred from an unspiritual Protestant spirit, in which it is actually unconsciously said: we are not getting anywhere with the mere continuation of the Protestant spirit, we have to borrow from the Catholics. Not that one reads entire masses in a language that has not yet become profane, but one takes only a word that sounds similar – not entire sentences – so that at least a small point of the Catholic loan can be introduced into the Protestant. That is the ultimate extreme to which the inadequate practice of religion now carries even theology, because one actually wants to reject any recognition of the sacred that is substantial. Such things must be seen in their true light; one must know that today it is a mere expression of powerlessness if one does not try to feel the sacred again by penetrating from the “Spiritus sanctus” merely pronounced in rigid words by the Catholic Church “Spiritus Sanctus” to the ‘Healing Spirit,’ as it is expressed by the Catholic Church only in the rigidly formulated words. In the same way, one can gain a complete inner experience through the word ‘healing spirit’ if one takes things as we receive them in the teaching on which your efforts are based as spiritual facts.

By founding this movement, you will and must gain the opportunity to shape your preaching in such a way that you do not turn it into a sentimental, heart-wrenching one, with a terrible, untrue sentimentality, by, as it were, squeezing feelings out of yourselves. You do not have to do that. Rather, you must see in the Act of Consecration of Man something that has a spiritual content in its imagery, and you must keep this spiritual content alive in your congregation, stirring it into vibrancy, so that you will not need will have need merely to put into words and convey to the faithful what you have wrung from your own mind, something that can be true only for a short time and that may afterwards very easily seem hackneyed in your preaching. In the Act of Consecration of Man, which you present to the faithful, you have something that moves people, something you can refer to every time you have something to say. In it you have something real that you can tie into, which immediately transforms your word into one that retains the emotional content when it is heard by the faithful. In this way you also escape the danger to which the Protestant-Evangelical preacher is always exposed; this danger consists in his being compelled to give the content of his feelings to his sermon out of his personal life. In doing so, he clouds himself in a certain way. You can get to know Protestant preachers who already cloud themselves when preparing the sermon and who cloud themselves even more when they preach. But as a result, the sermon does not come across as something true. Now, by having to squeeze his personal feelings out of himself, the person uses his entire soul, engages all his soul powers and has nothing left free to let the Christ enter while he is speaking the sermon. If the preacher can give a hint at the appropriate points to what is hinted at in the ritual and what the believer has come to know through contemplation, if he thus passes over to the exemplification of the ritual , which can become an infinitely rich one, and if he makes this linking to the cultic action in the sermon very pictorial, then he rises, as it were, above himself, does not fully engage his soul powers. And it is precisely at the point where he does not engage his soul powers, but rather what takes place through the exemplification of the Mass, that the Christ enters. And it is out of this mood that the Mass can be spoken. It is precisely through this that the preacher can truly let the Christ speak. The power of the Christ permeates his words, and the feeling of the faithful answers him like an echo.

What matters for the preacher to be a true preacher is that he experiences something from the divine side, just as the listener experiences something from the world side. Only through his experiencing something from the divine side, only through his leaning backward toward the divine, can the right thing be stimulated in the minds of the faithful through the preacher.

That is what must permeate the sermon. And if what I have now explained has become a truth in your soul, then you will find out quite naturally whether someone is suitable for admission to the community or not. This cannot be described in abstract words. It depends on how you yourself feel about the matter. There may be a “formula”, but the formula is not the essential thing. What is essential is your insight, your insight formed out of the spirit of a Christianity such as has been presented here, into the person whom you wish to receive into the community and also into the person whom you wish to receive into your own, narrower priestly community. In this way you will come to be able to answer the questions for yourselves inwardly. Firstly: Can this person listen properly when the Gospel is proclaimed? If you have established that he can listen properly, then he will be a true believer. You will be able to answer the second question for yourselves through inner experience: Can the man who comes to me repeat the words of the Gospel from the spirit in the right way? Can he speak to his listeners in such a way that it is not his words but the words of the Gospel that resound? Then I can accept him as a candidate for the ministry.

This should show you how you must not fall back into an abstract and theoretical life, how you should not answer the questions of life with abstract sentences, but in such a way that life itself is pointed out, above all, the life that has been kindled in you.

That is what needs to be said first. We shall speak about the Credo later.

The first question that we have yet to answer, and which can only be answered by me making suggestions to you, my dear friends, is the question of the actual and ongoing constitution of the community of soul shepherds itself. This morning, after I had explained the meaning of the community to you, I was able to answer your question with a reply that was more inward and more spiritual, but of course the point is that this community should present itself to the world with real clarity. And so, before we discuss the other matters, we want to be clear about some of the fundamentals.

Of course, a spiritual aspect is decisive for admission. It must be clear that the decision about admission cannot be made in any other way than through what I have already said this morning about this question. But now, of course, some difficult things come into consideration, because especially in the early days there will not yet be any practice to follow. It would be good if you could become clear about these difficult things in your own context while you are here, so that we could also talk about them together.

On the one hand, your community has grown out of the conviction that it draws a certain content from the anthroposophical movement, so

on the other hand, what I have already very clearly stated when your community was established - which is now to be regarded as established - must be adhered to for all time: that the community is constituted entirely from within, that it arises from within, that it therefore goes hand in hand with the anthroposophical movement,

that it can never be understood as if the anthroposophical movement were in some sense the founder of the community or had anything to do with the founding of your community. We have often spoken about this, and it is something that should be clear. And if it is not clear, more can be said about it.

On the other hand, however, the community must be treated as a serious and responsible one in the truest sense of the word. Such a community cannot be about people joining and leaving at will. This may correspond to the tendencies of the present time, but it can never lead to real prosperity. You must bear in mind that the decision you took to establish this community led you to perform the consecration ceremony here, and that the community has thus been constituted from the spiritual realm as a Christian community in the sense in which we have been discussing it this morning. This has given the seal to the whole of this undertaking. And the prevailing attitude of people in the present time must not be allowed to enter the community: simply to participate or not to participate. In such a matter, when one has made a decision, one must also regard its execution as binding for life. Of course, in connection with the consciousness of the person of the present time, this is already associated with certain difficulties. I would like to say that the kind of togetherness, the kind of feeling of belonging together, does indeed arise in individual cases, for example in the case of Korn, who perhaps should also be discussed here. In the case of Korn, we can see that on the one hand he has the will to work in the way you do, but on the other hand there is the opinion that he cannot find a connection to you. And you also have the opinion that it might not be good for him to work within the community. This is something that can lead to discussion, not so much because of the individual case, which can be one way or the other, but because the principle by which something like this must be judged can be seen from the specific case, and in the right way.

These are things that have to be taken in a rather difficult way, especially at the beginning. Now, of course, it is important that all those who belong or will belong to this community of spiritual shepherds develop an awareness: firstly, that the decision to belong is a very serious and binding one; secondly, however, that a separation should not take place just like that; and thirdly, that in a certain way the affiliation should also be established.

As I said, you establish the community on your own initiative, and insofar as it is now in the process of being established, what I am about to read to you is only a proposal from me that is to be considered, but which is of course initially only meant as a proposal. It could be that you consider some of the wording in particular to be such that you would prefer a more specific wording or the like. But it would be good to be completely clear about the fundamentals, so that what should initially appear to be self-evident, at least in its main parts, as a result of the ongoing negotiations and the whole way in which you have come together, would at least yield the following. So it would be a matter of everyone who joins the community also making such a confession:

“I confess that after mature reflection I have entered into the office of pastor of souls” — we will determine the name in the next few days — “of the... that I have received the consecration in such a way that it has been performed by the ordained persons, whose commission to consecrate I recognize, that the performance has taken place as if it had been performed out of my own free decision.” The emphasis on the free decision must be firmly established in the person of the present. “I declare that I regard the consecration as binding for my future life as a friend, so that separation from the community is not in my present will. Should I bring about a separation, I will recognize that the present leaders or their rightful successors in the community will make the moral evaluation of this separation, which I will recognize.

I will never change anything related to the cult through my individual will or carry it out differently than in the manner recognized by the leaders and directors. I have complete freedom in preaching and teaching as long as my teaching is not recognized by the leaders and directors in community as one that contradicts the content of the cult I practice in the sense of its institution.

It is very important that you are clear about the fact that complete freedom prevails with regard to doctrine when there is cohesion in the cult of the community. The freedom of preaching and teaching is secured by the fact that cohesion does not depend on agreement, which has its limits. Of course, this freedom has its limits in that what is taught does not contradict the spirit and meaning of the cult in some easily recognizable way. That would be an absurdity in itself. So if someone were to perform the Mass sacrifice and at the same time teach that it is nonsense, he would not be able to remain within the community, or at least not be able to teach. Is that not so? In so far as it is possible, freedom of teaching is recognized. And, my dear friends, without freedom of teaching we really do not get anywhere today, especially in a Christian community. Only worship must be seen in the right light, then, I would like to say, it is precisely from the presence of worship that freedom of teaching arises.

The Catholic Church also still has some of this doctrinal freedom in itself, only of course it sins against it, I would say, not just every day, but every hour. But it still has some of it in itself. In this sense, I would like to mention an incident that happened to me several years ago, where I asked a question of a Viennese professor who was a Catholic priest and taught at the Faculty of Philosophy, who was closely monitored [by Rome] with regard to what he taught as a professor about ancient classical philosophy. The person in question was a Cistercian. I asked: How is it that you are being closely monitored? Actually, nothing comes out of your mouth that could be considered offensive in Rome, while Professor Bickell in Innsbruck, as a professor of theology, as a dogmatist, taught things in the most liberal way, which the church should have been paying attention to for a long time. “The professor said, 'Yes, Bickell is a Jesuit, the Church is safe with him, he can teach whatever he wants.' We Cistercians are not so well regarded [in Rome]; it is thought that we could very easily separate from the Church. — So it is not important to the Roman Catholic Church that someone teaches dogmatics freely, but it is important to be sure that the person in question does not find a contradiction to the church in the free teaching of dogmatics and perhaps comes to the idea of a separation.

These are the things that, where there is a real cult, actually make the freedom of teaching absolutely possible. For what is cult? Cult consists in actions that are set apart from the natural context in which man is interwoven on earth, and yet they are real processes. Cultic acts have only one reality in the outer world during their earthly existence, and that is the Mystery of Golgotha. There is only one reality on earth, namely that of the Mystery of Golgotha, which has the same reality as the cultic act, even though it is a physical act, a physical process. If we want to visualize the matter schematically, we can say (and draw on the board):

There are events in the physical world. These events, which take place in such a way that they can be seen with the eyes, are caused by forces that arise from the depths of matter, which we express with natural laws.

Plate 3

What we celebrate as a cultic act are also events in the physical world, but they correspond to forces in which we place ourselves, which come down from the spiritual world.

Panel 3

Thus, what is transferred into reality by means of the cult is not the image of a material event, but the image of a spiritual event. When you celebrate mass, the community that sits with you before the altar, the lay community, participates through its gaze in an action, in a process that eye outwardly reveals, outwardly presents, what is present in the spiritual world, so that what takes place at the altar is performed together with the community as an event of the spiritual world.

Let us understand this according to its inner meaning. Understood in terms of its inner meaning, in the sense of what has been discussed this morning, it means that during the celebration of the Mass, Christ becomes present within the community. When Christ is present within the community, the true self of each individual who devoutly participates in the Mass in the right way is called into this community, and it is now like this: Let us assume that we have the celebrating priest and, say, ten parishioners. The true self of these ten parishioners is present during that part of the Mass that extends from transubstantiation to the end, if the Mass is celebrated in the proper manner. Now, something similar is brought about in people as a result, let us say, in the sleeping and waking of daily life. If it were the case that we fell asleep and consciously experienced everything that I once described here in this building as the conditions during sleep, then we would indeed continue to live as human beings in such a way that we would inwardly hold on to that which we had experienced during sleep. If we were to lose our body at the moment of falling asleep, then we would, through the loss of the body, pass over to a certain consciousness of that which otherwise remains unconscious in sleep and we would thus continue to live; it would be very similar to what is also experienced between death and a new birth. But we wake up again, we return to our physical organism and experience something different in our physical organism than during sleep. But in the course of life, the experiences of sleep add up, and we go through death with the sum of these experiences, that is, with a very strong impact of what we experience during sleep.

This is also the case when we consider the human consecration ritual. There it is so that we must say: By the human being's presence at the act of consecration, the true self of each individual appears – at least initially in an ideal way, but of course it must continue to progress in your community precisely through the performance of the act of consecration. This is there. It disappears again during the usual experiences of the day, just as the experiences of sleep disappear during waking. It goes away again, but the Act of Consecration is repeated, and so it adds up and the person connects more and more with his true self through this continued sacrifice of Christ. It is indeed the case that an ever stronger connection with the true self takes place through an ever stronger overcoming of the separation from the self, as I have presented it this morning.

Let us assume that you read a human consecration ritual with a specific intention, let us say, with the intention of reading it for a number of dead people. You can do that. In the Catholic Church, this has led to the nonsense of paying for masses for the dead. That's not what I mean. But a mass can be read for a series of dead people, and in doing so, you can connect with the true selves of the dead, not only celebrating their memory but connecting with the true selves of the dead. In short, you are led everywhere to the fact that a cult that is rightly established is something in the physical world, that takes place in the physical world, but that points to fundamental spiritual forces, while the other phenomena of the physical world point to fundamental material forces. Make it clear to yourself that this is really to be understood with the ordinary mind. It is to be understood with the ordinary mind. When one says one does not understand it, one just does not want to think clearly.

You see, if you have the ground here, with a row of plants growing out of it (it is drawn on the board, top left), and if we now capture the moment when these plants begin to flower – I still want to draw the seed here – then you see, they flower, and the flower is there for a while, the flower fades again. Our eyes have seen something that is only there for a while and then disappears. There comes a time when it is no longer there; there was a time when this appearance began. What remains is that which is the power of the seed; this is something very inconspicuous in material terms. It is present as long as the plant species in question exists on earth; it is something rooted in the depths of matter. What appears in the blossom is a temporary phenomenon. If you look at what underlies the visible, you have to look at something completely different than at this temporary phenomenon. Just as you look at the blooming and fading of the flower for a while here, you look at the mass from the relay prayer, through the offertory, the consecration, the communion, to “ite missa est”. That is what the eyes have before them; it is exactly the same as what you have in the blooming and fading of the flower as a color phenomenon. Only in one case do the color phenomena point you to what is going on in the seeds in the depths of matter; in the other case, at Mass, the visible phenomena point you to the spiritual world. Thus, the ordinary mind needs no more ideas to understand a cultic ceremony than it needs to understand a physical phenomenon. That people today in the present civilization believe that they can more easily understand sensual-physical phenomena - which are, after all, the manifestation of a system of forces hidden in matter - than a cultic act as a manifestation of a spiritual one, is merely a prejudice.

If I am to point out to you something that has changed extraordinarily in relation to the relationship between man and the spiritual world in a relatively short period of time, it is the following: Do you see what happens today when a Protestant or Catholic clergyman is placed among freethinkers, for example in a discussion about transubstantiation? No. We want to be objective about things and not take what is said in a critical sense. What happens in such a case today? Of course there are exceptions, but I would almost say that the exceptions are the phlegmatic ones. Those, on the other hand, who are more intensively involved in the exercise of their ministry, initially become nervous when the discussion begins; they really do become nervous at first, especially the Catholic clergy, when something like transubstantiation is mentioned. Why? Because people today have lost all ground when talking about such a thing. People are so accustomed to the grossly sensual ideas that gradually dominate science that they have lost all ground to speak about such a thing in this way. Now I do not want to say something about myself, but I want to tell an historical fact. Sixty or sixty-two years ago in Austria there was a Catholic bishop who said the following about transubstantiation in his teaching: What forces are at work in any material context cannot actually be known from that material context. For – as he said – we need only refer to the chemist Liebig. Liebig, in the 1820s, as they say, 'flourished'. He once said, and had it printed: If people claim that the composition of a seed is inexplicable, they should consider that quartz or another crystal is just as inexplicable. The inorganic life, when it is formed, is just as mysterious as the seed in terms of the underlying forces. The good Austrian canon, then, argued that one cannot possibly know what is inside a wafer because one does not know what shaped it in the first place. I just want to make it clear to you that sixty-two years ago, even as a Catholic canon, one still engaged in philosophical discussions about the plausibility of such an idea. Today, a canon gets nervous when asked about transubstantiation because no one thinks anymore about using the human mind to explain supernatural facts. This is something you will have to thoroughly unlearn. You must acquire the courage to use the human mind to explain supernatural facts. It is only a prejudice to think that physical facts can be explained better than spiritual ones. First of all, spiritual facts have to be recognized; then they can be explained just as easily as physical facts, or just as difficultly. Without the recognition of this inner capacity for belief, you will naturally not fulfill your office.

But by recognizing the forms, you come to the cult and to an understanding of it. You see, the day before yesterday I gave our workers over there [at the Goetheanum building] a lecture, as I often do with them. In this lecture I tried to make them understand how, by observing the physical organism, one gradually comes to an appreciation of the soul and the spiritual. I said: What does a person mainly eat, what does he consume? — With the various foods, for example, he consumes starch. The starch is absorbed from the mouth, passes through the oesophagus into the stomach and intestines; it is transformed; through a triple salivation, through ptyalin, pepsin and trypsin, the starch becomes sugar. We eat potatoes, which are mainly starch, but we do not carry starch in us, but after digestion we carry sugar in us. We eat protein; after some time this protein is dissolved so that it is in us as liquid protein. However, there is one thing that is often exploited by medical and natural scientists in a harmful way: alcohol is constantly produced in the interaction of intestinal contents and the trypsin of the pancreas. You can't be completely teetotal. Even if you don't drink alcohol, you produce the necessary alcohol because the protein has to be preserved just so. Just as you put preparations from the animal kingdom in alcohol [for preservation], so our intestinal contents must be put in “alcohol,” and we produce that ourselves. There the protein is killed, but then preserved and only revived in the lymph vessels. I also said to the workers: We eat fats, which are also metabolized, they are not simply emulsified. When we consume fat, it is not simply distributed throughout the body; it first undergoes a transformation. The fat we eat becomes glycerin and various acids in us. Only salts remain essentially unchanged. So we eat starch-like substances. We only take sugar out of instinct, because as humans we are too weak to take the starch that turns into sugar; otherwise we would not need sugar. So while we enjoy starches, proteins, fats, and salts entering the mouth, after a while we have sugar, liquid protein - which is significantly different from the protein in the state in which we eat it - glycerin, fatty acids, and salts in our bodies. Only the salts go as far as our brain and accumulate there; the rest only goes part of the way to our brain. But essentially, part of it turns into phosphorous, a very volatile substance, and goes to the brain that way. I have made it clear to the workers, on the basis of these processes, how the soul can be easily understood if they just set the human mind in motion. It will be a long time before people are ready for this. In this way, it is easy to make even the simplest person understand the soul and spirit through the processes of bodily life.

Now just think about what is actually happening. Through the spiritual and soul life, a complete transformation is taking place in us. The person who ate two hours ago does not look very different from the one who is still about to eat. You cannot tell from his nose or eyes what is going on in his soul and spirit. What is performed in the Act of Consecration of Man is a spiritual act. The sensual image [in transubstantiation] does not need to be so very different from what it used to be; what is different can only be detected in its finer structure with spiritual instruments. To the clairvoyant eye, the transubstantiated host looks different from the non-transubstantiated one. So they have something that is a continuous analog of what is going on (physically).

So it is possible to understand the cult intimately inwardly as that which has a spiritual existence among us. When one professes the cult, when one performs the cult directly, then one has such strength in the practice of the cult that one may already rely on that on which one must rely in every proclamation of truth in a teaching: that one is on the right path in one direction. Then one can be completely free in the teaching itself. In the moment when the spirit is among us and finds its revelation in the cult, we can be considered free in the teaching. For the life in the cult will lead us not to abuse this freedom in the teaching. Therefore, there is a real and profound meaning here: “In preaching and teaching, I have complete freedom as long as my teaching is not recognized by superiors and leaders in the community as contradicting the content of the cult I practice in the sense of its institution.” I have only added this “in the sense of its institution” because we are at the beginning and because it is necessary for most people to insert here what is given as an interpretation in the course of time. This will gradually become something that is established simply by itself.

I want to put that before you first. Perhaps you could take these suggestions as a basis and then let me know tomorrow if you have anything to add. I can imagine that you are afraid of this formulation – but it would be an unfounded fear. And in particular, I believe that one must still be clear about such things, which, as with Korn, lead to the fact that he himself wants and yet does not want and one has the opinion that one cannot use him after all. Friedrich Rittelmeyer: When we were together in Nuremberg, he did frighten some of us.

Rudolf Steiner: It is the case that those to whom he speaks refer to the fact that he tends very strongly towards extremes in his decisions and that the reason for not taking him in could certainly be that he perhaps does not have sufficient discretion in saying things one way or the other. He didn't phrase it the way I did, but he said that they have the doctrine of reincarnation and that they simply have to teach it. He put it differently, but that depends entirely on the configuration of his mind. Of course you can say that they demand a certain spiritual balance. But such people, who have participated in too many things – he was at last year's course and he has actually come too far in participating – are in a difficult position, and the community is also in a difficult position because of him. And now he was with me today and said that he actually felt called to teach and to be a priest. I said to him: Yes, it's true, now the community is there; I can't do the slightest thing about it, but you must now either stand within the community and become one with it, then everything could be all right, or you must immediately place yourself as an individual and become a priest through yourself; there is no third way. He claims that he not only wants to teach, but also wants to baptize and perform other ritual acts; he therefore wants to do the same as you do. However, if he were to do this incorrectly, appointing himself and standing in no relation to you, then difficulties would arise. So I have said that he should deal with you.

I thought that after this had been presented to you by me, it would serve as a kind of standard for admissions.

My dear friends! I have the following to say to you, in continuation of our conversation yesterday morning. The point is that you feel in the right way the sending out by the spiritual powers present in the spiritual world and connected with Christ's life on earth, and that you feel your own connection with these spiritual powers as your mission. And in this sense I have read to you the words from the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 5, verses 9 and 10, in the way they present themselves when we try to penetrate their real meaning in our language:

After Christ brought his bodily life to an end, he is the healer of sins through all earthly times for all who are filled with him, and is referred to with the word of the spirit as the highest savior of souls according to the rite of Melchi-Sadek.

Only when you feel your own calling in the spirit of these words, with which at the beginning of the Christian era those who were to fulfill the mission of Christ to the full were sent out, will you be able to see in them a renewal of Christian work. Now, however, it is important that we are able to let this word - which is an old word, but has been renewed in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews - have the right effect on our souls. This word, which designates the actual mission of the Christian priesthood, points out to us that only those in the early days of Christian development, that is, in the first centuries of Christianity, sensed their priestly mission in the right way, who said: We do not want to understand alone, in the sense of the Levitical rite, that which we have to bring into the world as a cult, but we want to see through the look through the Levitical rite to that rite which stands nearer to the divine world order and according to which the priest-king Sadek, Adonai Melchi-Sadek, performed the sacrificial service before the priest-king of the ancient Jews, and that is a sacrificial service which Abraham, the old priest-king of the Jews, to whom the Levitical priestly service is to be traced back, also recognized as the higher one for that time. This indicates to us that the sacrificial service of the Jews, insofar as it is traced back to the sacrifice of Abraham, must be understood as a lower one in the early days of Christianity compared to that which was then accomplished in its archetypal old way by Melchi-Sadek, and which in a higher sense, closer to the spiritual world, was again accomplished, is being accomplished and is to be further accomplished by the Christ Jesus Himself. It is pointed out that what Christ's sacrifice is - which is to be renewed on the altar in the way it can happen -, is a higher act than the act that was offered in the days before Abraham - not to the God Jehovah - by Melchi-Sadek, and we must now understand what is actually in these words.

It is said that Melchi-Sadek offered his sacrifice through bread and wine, which were considered inferior to the offerings made by Abraham – the underlying concept here is quite clear. However, we must also bear in mind that the expression “bread and wine” is one that came from later, exoteric Judaism and no longer shows the original full understanding. Because this original and complete understanding was no longer present in those who had a hand in formulating the text of the Old Testament, but only in those initiates who still had an understanding of the ancient initiation in the early centuries of Christianity, it can no longer be fully determined from the text of the Old Testament what is actually meant by the sacrifice of Melchizedek. And yet, those who are sent out into the world as priests today must also have a correct understanding of these offerings of Melchi-Sadek.

If one goes back to what is really meant, in the sense of the initiatory knowledge, when it is said that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek was offered in the form of bread and wine, one comes to see that in the bread, in the right initiatory knowledge, has always been seen as a carrier of salt. The Jews actually no longer acted in the right sense and with the right understanding when they forgot the salt and even emphasized that it was necessary to use unleavened bread for the sacred sacrificial act. In the bread that was originally meant, salt was seen, just as in the wine it was not the wine as such that was seen, as it presents itself in its wine substance, but it was sought in the wine the extraordinarily volatile, fluctuating content of sulfur or phosphorus, which in the old term is one and the same. If we speak in the right sense, we must actually say that the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek - that is, the sacrifice that was performed according to his rite - was offered through salt and sulfur - or through salt and phosphorus - as found in the foodstuffs bread and wine. That is the original conception, and initiation is called “initiation” because it always goes back to the original conception. In the ancient Hebrew priesthood, the real bread, which contains salt, was replaced by unleavened bread for a certain reason that was not human, because certain secrets were no longer known.

What is it, then, that is contained in salt and phosphorus when a person absorbs them through bread and wine? In salt and phosphorus, through salt, lies the connection between man and the earth. The more salt a person absorbs, the more he connects with the earth, and the more phosphorus he absorbs, the more he breaks away from it and frees himself from it. What takes place in the human body – not outside of the human body – through the combination of salt and phosphorus is a process that properly connects the person to earthly existence, because the salt connects him to the earth in the right way, while the phosphorus snatches him away from earthly existence in the right way, making him free from it again. It is so that the man who has salt and phosphorus in the right way in him stands on the earth in the right way, is properly connected to the earth, but also receives the necessary ethereal and astral lightness to be free again from the earth forces in his being. The fact that the Jews of later times laid the main emphasis on the unleavened in bread showed that they no longer wanted to be connected with the earth, but wanted to have in the bread itself that which would carry them above the earth. Thus they wanted a supermundane and not an earthly priesthood; they wanted a priesthood that would rule the earth from the outside. This was the case with Judaism in particular at the time of Christ. Because Judaism, through long periods of time, had established a priesthood in its mysteries that was not properly connected with the earth, it could not understand that the Being of whom its initiates spoke as the coming Messiah could come to perfection in an earthly body; and it never dawned on the initiated Jews either that the Christ could have walked on earth in an earthly body, in the body of Jesus. Only Paul realized this when he received the help that the Christ revealed Himself not in the earthly body but in the etheric body.

Thus are all things connected, and this you must feel, for the words from the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which were given to those who were sent out as priests in the first Christian centuries, these words can only be understood in the right way from these foundations. But what is gained by going back to the actual original form of the offering of “salt and brimstone”? We can imagine what is gained by doing so if we imagine the contrast that existed between the high priest, between Melchi-Sadek, who was also a priest-king, an Adonai, and Abraham. In the current of intellectual life in which Melchi-Sadek also stood, the idea of repeated earthly lives was alive. It lived precisely in the mystery community to which Melchi-Sadek belonged in such a way that it was kept hidden from the uninitiated as a mystery, but it was handed over to all those who had been initiated into these mysteries. The Abrahamitic Hebraism was characterized by the fact that it restricted human perception to what arises as something spiritual for man when one disregards repeated earth lives, when one does not go into them, when one still takes scantily into account the pre-earthly life that preceded one's earth life and then considers the post-earthly life.

At least that was the teaching of the Pharisees. Abraham was the forefather of Judaism, who had the mission, within the education of mankind on earth, not to allow the teaching of repeated earthly lives to be active at first, in contrast to the higher priest, whom he recognized and who applied this teaching to those who were consecrated by him when they offered a sacrifice. He was opposed to the view of Melchi-Sadek, as described in the Old Testament. We must visualize this view of Melchi-Sadek in the following way.

It was the case that those who became disciples of Melchi-Sadek, which Abraham did not fully become, came to recognize that a person who, here on earth, in addition to doing good and right, also does wrong, needs a power that passes from his present body to the body of the next earthly life. Man cannot by himself carry over into the body, that is to say into the physical and etheric organization of the next earth-life, that which he accomplishes as activity in one earth-life; he can carry it over - and that now in sense of the time of human evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, in that what is accomplished through the cult with salt and phosphorus is done for him, in the sense that Melchi-Sadek accomplished the sacrifice through bread and wine. This enabled people in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha to take with them into the bodies they took on in the next life on earth the consequences of the good and evil they had committed in the previous life on earth. In other words, it was only through this that people were able to develop karma. None of the moral actions of one earthly life would have been passed on to a future life if it had not been for this kind of passing from body to body of what must be borne, so that there is karma, the cosmic destiny of man.

And what would have happened if there had been no such sacrifices of salt and phosphorus, if there had been no priest-kings to perform these sacrifices and thus become human beings who, so to speak, carried the other bodies along with them through their own momentum and enthusiasm, thus carrying the power of karma from one earthly life to another? Then the good and evil that people have done in one earthly life would have fallen away from them in that particular earthly life and become an inheritance of that power which, in the sense of the Gospel, is referred to as the “prince of this world”, not as the prince to whom man, with his innermost being, belongs. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the constant struggle of the time was that the so-called prince of this world - a spirit that had become Luciferic-Ahrimanic, namely a spirit that had become strongly Ahrimanic - took possession of that which tends towards evil in man, so that he could use the power of this evil for himself in the cosmic order. Human beings would then have become increasingly free from this evil. They were not allowed to do so; they were not allowed to do so because otherwise a new existence of their own would have begun in each new life on earth, and they would never have been able to atone for what is called 'sin' themselves. The sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek therefore consists in the fact that the healing of sins was preserved for men by continually snatching them from the prince of this world, and thus giving men the possibility of effecting a sin-atoning through their own nature in a subsequent life on earth. The Catholic Church was careful later on not seriously to consider this secret, which it has known for many centuries, even as late as the Middle Ages, and which is still known today by individual initiates of the Catholic Church, as religious content, for the reason that it is easier to tell people that their sins are forgiven, that is, that they are wiped out of the earth, even with the help of indulgences, to blot them out, instead of telling them that one is working to ensure that they are not blotted out on earth and do not become prey to the prince of this world and thereby corrupt the world for eternity instead of telling them that the healing of sins consists precisely in the fact that man is given the opportunity to make up for sins in the following earthly life.

In the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, therefore, in the right sense for that time, the remedy for sins is given, and the healing consisted in giving men the strength to keep their sins and not to deliver them up to the prince of this world. All that lies in the meaning of these words, you, my dear friends, will find renewed and exalted in what the Christ accomplished on earth. And only this illumination, which is now being given, will lead you on the path to recognize in the right sense what the word means: Christ took upon Himself the sins of men, united with them. Christ did not come to unite human piety with Himself, but He was the One who united Himself with the sins of men in order to take upon Himself the burden of sin. And when Paul says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” he means: You humans should accept the Christ in you, and thus accept the current in you that goes into the future of the earth, which contains your stream of sins, but the stream of sins that does not lead to death, but to the atonement of sins. And as priests you will become real healers of sins, not repulsors of sins, whereby men would perish in the light of their existence on earth. Again, this mystery is not explained in the church because it does not want to say what speaks to the courage, but what speaks to the cowardice of men. And it speaks to the cowardice of men when one says: Your sins will be taken from you. But one must speak to the courage and strength of men when one tells them: Your sins will be kept from you, you can carry them into the following earthly lives and can create the compensation for them so that you do not spoil earthly development, and in this way you can carry what you have worked for into future earthly cycles. But this is what you must feel with dignity again if you want to understand your priestly office in the right way. For then you will unite in your mission the three things that the Christ wants to see united in the mission of those who follow him and acknowledge him as the true Master, who in a higher sense has renewed the sacrifice of Melchi-Sadek, who acknowledge him in such a way that they continue his work among men in the threefold sense:

Firstly: in the name of the Father, by feeling truly imbued with God and the spirit, by feeling themselves to be priests not merely by profession, by virtue of their office, but by feeling themselves to be priests through the spirit. Those who do not perform their priestly duties with enthusiasm but merely as a job – which is always the heritage of the prince of this world – do not perform them in the sense of Christ.

"The second is that the word of the gospel is not externalized in the sense of the prince of this world, but proclaimed in the sense of the living Christ, so that the proclamation of the gospel is based on spiritual understanding in the heart of the priest. The continuing churches have sinned very grievously against the second, that which Christ demanded of his servants; they have sinned very grievously by bringing about conditions that are still visible today in their extremes. Especially those who want to be priests or teachers of the gospel very often most often criticize when anyone wants to base the gospel on the living spirit again. And then, in a seductive way that actually contains a Luciferic impulse, it is said that the Gospel should not be interpreted in a “complicated” way – but it is not a matter of a complicated interpretation, but of an interpretation in keeping with the spirit – it should be interpreted in simple words, as they stand. But that means nothing other than that it should not be interpreted at all. Because the way it is proclaimed today is not the gospel; that is, the way it is proclaimed today is actually denied by many theologians. The second thing you should feel as priests of a renewed priesthood is that you should carry out your ministry with enthusiasm, that you have the will to fulfill Scripture in a spiritual sense.

The third thing is that you want to be and should be in the right sense soul doctors of people, soul healers, by your word actually being fulfilled by that power that is given with the commission you have received, by that power through which you, when you perform the cult in the right sense and teach from inner enthusiasm, from inner knowledge, interpreting the scriptures , then in your work you have the power to heal souls, that is, to truly continue the work that the Christ accomplished with the Mystery of Golgotha and that is indicated by the words that he who struggles for the inheritance of evil in human nature, so that this human nature may not bring sin from one from one life to another, has been bound by the Mystery of Golgotha in the earthly life for a thousand years, that is, for a period at the end of which people should have become so strong that they can no longer fall prey to him; then he will be released again, and then people will have to have greater strength to resist him.

We live in the time, my dear friends, in which, on the one hand, Christ wants to show Himself to people again to strengthen their power; in this time we must prepare ourselves for this in the appropriate way. But we also live in the time when the thousand years are fulfilled, when the adversary wants to break his fetters and will do his utmost to achieve his intentions. And that is the time when the real secret of human evolution will be revealed to people, that those who truly feel the “Christ in me” take their sins with them by having the intention not to repel sins and thereby deliver them to the adversary, but to take them within themselves and, through what happened at Golgotha, to have a healing effect on humanity.

My dear friends, I believe you expected to learn not an unctuous reworking of what has already been taught, but something that really contains the secrets of initiation; and you will see that much of what has been taught so far is the very opposite of what is real. And if you cannot feel very keenly that you have to bring something new into the world, which in many respects is the very opposite of what is not a teaching from God but a teaching from the prince of this world, then you will not be able to enter into what you want in the right way. It is therefore an important matter. And the words that I have to add, so to speak, as the “first sermon” at the first mass that has been held here, must not only be words spoken in theory, but they must contain something that can shake your souls in a certain way and bring them to a new state of mind. Because the time has come when people must again be told: Change your minds! And those who want to lead people in a new priestly sense must also speak in such a way that it is said: Change the mind by which, in misunderstanding the facts, the Christian mind has been veiled to man so far!

In this way, after the preceding ceremonies, it falls to me to address the word of sending to you, the word of sending that was spoken in the sense of the first Christian sending of those who had been called to the apostolate, this word of sending forth, which is recorded in the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, chapter 1, verse 6. And this word I have to speak to you at this moment in the manner in which we can express it in our present language:

I exhort you always to stir up the gift of the Holy Spirit that is in you, which was given to you by the touch of the power of the Spirit world.

And I have to add the word from the first epistle of Timothy, chapter 4, verse 14, which in turn is translated into the language that is expressed by our present words with liveliness, so it means:

Do not lose the excited spiritual power from the eyes of your soul, which is given to you through the spirit word that touches the power of the spiritual world and works in the future.

Those who were sent out in the first Christian centuries to become the apostles were sent out in the spirit of the words of truth contained in these letters to Timothy, and became true followers of the apostles. And if you want to carry out what you have set out to do in the right way, you must become successors of the apostles. You can only do that if you say to yourselves: The apostles will speak to us in the mind of Christ; but we must bring the right understanding to the language of the apostles! And in order for you to have the right understanding of the language of the Apostles, I followed the solemn ceremony of the ordination of the shepherds of souls by connecting, so to speak, the first sermon for the Apostle ministry, which can lead you in the right sense to an understanding of your Apostle ministry. But only if you know that it is precisely in the alchemy of salt and phosphorus – or sulphur – that is, in the bread and wine, that you renew what happened on the cross and as a result of the death on the cross, then you will know that you have to consider the third as part of your mission. The three components of your mission are as follows:

First, that you should discharge your office in the enthusiasm with which the divine spiritual world permeates us;

secondly, that you should bring strength to the communities in the living word, not in the dead word, which actually denies the real spirit and which today, out of a Luciferian inclination, is called the “simple” word; and

thirdly, that you feel like real healers, like real doctors for the sins of humanity, that is, that you can accomplish, in addition to your own state of soul, in addition to the interpretation of the word the miracle of the remission of sins, that is, the transformation of the inheritance of the prince of this world into a good that the Christ carries into the souls of men through all subsequent eras and circles of the earth for the atonement of sins. As one imbued with God, as a teacher of God and as a healer of sins – in this sense you must give to your communities and tell them what you yourselves experience in your enthusiasm, what you can learn as a teacher of God within you, and that it may become manifest to them what you have attained as the living power of the healing of sins. That is what I had to place upon your souls today.

A participant: What about the breaking off of a piece of the host? Does that have something to do with the human constitutional elements?

Rudolf Steiner: If we see in the whole host what lives as solar power in man, we first take in nine-tenths, which we initially let work through their salt content. In this way, we connect nine-tenths of what is in us with our earthly existence, in the way I have just described. The question is: what happens to the remaining tenth? We immerse it in the wine, and before it enters our organism, we mix it with the phosphorus of the wine. It is in this mixing of the phosphorus with the salt that the part of the action taken out of the human being lies. The other part of the action takes place when we allow the salt to combine with the phosphorus merely through inner alchemy. The fact that we also take a small part out of this inner alchemy and leave it to the power that lives on the altar, that is what lies in the breaking away of the tenth from the host.

If we consider the whole human being, in the sense in which I have presented it in my “Theosophy”, according to its nine parts, we find, if we go down from above: spirit man, spirit of life, spirit self, consciousness soul, mind soul, sentient soul, sentient body, etheric body, physical body. These are the nine members. They would not connect with earthly life in the right way if there were not a synthesis: this is the tenth (see the larger circle drawn around the nine smaller circles in the diagram on Plate 3). This gives us ten members, which also appear in the ten Sephirot of the pre-Christian era, albeit in the way that corresponds to that time, when full self-awareness did not yet exist. If you now think of the host in connection with the ten members of the human being, you have in it a member that is the physical body, the ninth (in the drawing, the small red circle), which is actually the tenth. This physical body is in a special position, it is in a different position from the other links in human nature. You have to bear in mind that if you look out into the vastness of space from the earth, in the parts bordering on the earth, in a very, very fine resolution, you have everything that is on the earth, except for the salt-like. The salt-like is a property of the earth itself. There was once a period in the evolution of the Earth when salt formations also occurred in the Earth's immediate surroundings, but they no longer developed into solids, remaining instead in a liquid or gaseous state. Then a time came in the evolution of the earth when salt formation only occurred on the earth itself and in its immediate vicinity, so that the ether, which permeates the earth but extends beyond it, has no part in the formation of salt. Salt is something that has only a meaning for earthly existence itself, and this is shown by the fact that for no other celestial body but the Earth has salt formation become the peculiar characteristic of planetary formation. If you take the physical body, then, simply through its organization, it has a share in salt. And at the moment when you break out of the whole human being, which the host represents, the 'physical body', you can say: I cannot have this body connected in any other way with the one in which the other parts are already inside, than by me letting what can no longer take place on earth in the right way, what only takes place in a decadent way – by forming phosphoric acid salts, , but which make up precisely the heaviest part of the human being, his bony part, which belongs solely and exclusively to earthly existence. By allowing this to combine in an extra-terrestrial way – that is, allowing the salt to combine with the phosphorus that is in the wine – I allow, through what I do in the rite, through Christ, that which would not be effected in my own body. So I must consume a part of the host in such a way that it does not work like the other part of the host; so that [by breaking off a part of the host] it should be shown that man himself is not the alchemist who effects the transmutation, but it should be shown how that which man cannot do is done by the power of Christ at the altar.

This is how the matter presents itself when we consider it in terms of the new spiritual alchemy.

A participant: What about the seven candles on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: It is good to put into words everything that is present in the cultus in a physical form, because the physical form of the cultus should speak to us. If we wanted to express in a single sentence what is contained in the seven candles, we would have to say: Just as there are seven human constitutional elements within you, a sevenfold power radiates out of the ritual for you, each part of which belongs to a part of your own being.

A participant: What can be said about the figures on the chasuble?

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the processes that take place in the cosmos and which either close in on human beings, so that they participate in cosmic processes, or which are expressed in a different way so that they develop images or replicas of them, then, if we want to express this in words, we can only do so in the following way: Panel 3

We can say that ascending and descending forces are at work everywhere in the cosmos. These ascending and descending forces can best be visualized by a line like this:

We would then have the ascending forces on one side and the descending forces on the other.

On the one side we would have the ascending forces and on the other the descending forces. You can imagine it something like this: if you were to stand on one pan of a set of scales, you would be heavy, i.e. you would take part in the general ponderability of the earth, in gravity. You would join the forces that work downwards. There are, of course, other forces at work than those that we initially think of as represented by gravity. You could live in connection with everything that manifests itself as gravity, but you could never develop a soul life permeated by thoughts. For if you were only exposed to these forces of gravity, your brain would weigh 1500 grams; but a brain weighing 1500 grams would immediately crush all the fine veins beneath it. If the brain were to press down on the lower surface of the head with this weight, a person would not be able to think, and would therefore not be able to develop a soul life. How do we develop a soul life? You develop a soul life, to put it bluntly, through Archimedes' principle. Archimedes said that when he was once in the bath, he observed that he felt lighter than outside the water. And in physics we learn the law that every body, when immersed in water, loses as much weight as the weight of the amount of water displaced by it, so that when you are in the water, you lose as much weight as a human formed from water would weigh. Now our brain is floating in the brain fluid and as a result it loses so much of its weight that instead of pressing down with 1500 grams, it only weighs 20 grams. In physics, what counteracts the force of gravity in the fluid, which now works upwards and not downwards, is called buoyancy. Thus man lives with his soul not in the forces of gravity, the ponderable forces, but in those forces that draw upward; he himself is a physical cosmos, which, as regards his soul life, does not live in what is heavy in him, but in what continually strives to escape from gravity in him.

Thus we can say: We need only look at the human being very roughly in physical terms, and we cannot think materially at all. The human being has the characteristic of being heavy. But if we were to think with the material, we would have to think with the heaviness. We cannot think with heaviness, but only with uplift. It is therefore nonsense to believe that we think with heaviness. We think with that which strives upward to heaven; thus we join the forces that work upward. We human beings live in the forces that draw downward and those that work upward; our inner being is in the upward-working forces, our outer being in the downward-drawing ones. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is neutral in relation to gravity, the astral body pulls up and the I is carried up through the astral body, not down. Thus the outer man is integrated into the cosmos. But what does he do as an organism that also has an inner organic life? The following happens:

Everything that takes place in the head is a true reflection of what is happening in the metabolic-limb organization. When, for example, a person digests and his kidney and liver systems work together to regulate digestion in the right way, a process takes place in the kidney and liver systems that is also reflected in the left part of the brain. There is never just something going on below or just above, but there are always corresponding processes taking place below and above. Thus, just as the human being is outwardly embedded in the cosmos of ascending and descending forces, so too is he inwardly endowed with these forces; those forces that are in the left part of the brain act down in the liver and kidneys; those forces that are in the upper right part of the brain act down in the stomach (see diagram, plate 3).

And if we follow the effects of these forces, the ascending and descending ones, we get this second line:

Plate 3

There is a neutral point in the human being where these two forces intersect. If you show yourself as a spiritual person to the believing community, and you show yourself from the front, you show yourself in this form (see drawing). If you turn around, then that part of you which is more an image of your own inner being shows itself in the other line. With regard to the upper, dotted part, it is then a matter of taking it up through yourself, that is, letting it go within you and leaving it to the gods to properly effect the transformation of the ascending into the descending forces. So that you simply show what is right when you are vested. You pronounce the secrets of the world through the vestment.

So you can't say: why is that so? In the material world, man is simply Maya. During the sacred act, he can show himself as he is in relation to the cosmos and to himself. You make sure that the person shows himself not in an illusory form, but in his truth. The image is intended to suggest what is a reality in the human being in the spiritual sense, but what is also reproduced in the physical human being. You just need to form a picture of how the blood circulation in the human being proceeds in the left and right halves of the heart, how the blood flows from the right atrium to the right ventricle, through the lungs, back to the left atrium , from there to the left ventricle, and again supplies the upper part of the human being, this is visible in an approximate way, corresponding to earthly conditions. Only when one follows this line, the point of intersection is somewhat shifted in the physical and is more towards the bottom.

A participant: Does a donation formula have to be given for the community communion?

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is as follows: the Act of Consecration of Man, the Mass, can be read and the faithful merely listen. The Communion of the faithful can also be incorporated into the Act of Consecration of Man; in that case it takes place after the Priestly Communion. And so it should actually be that all the breads are in the paten, to be used for the Communion of the faithful, and that all the wine is in the chalice, to be used for the Communion of the faithful. So the Priestly Communion is coming to an end.

May Your Body, O Christ, which I have received, and Your Blood, which gives me life, penetrate me, so that the disease of sin may be cured by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, let it be so.

Now the priests' communion is over; now the faithful's communion begins:

The body of Christ which you receive and the blood of Christ which gives you life may permeate you so that the disease of sin may be healed by the healing medicine, the sacrament.

It is done through You, who bear and order the life of the world, as You receive it from the Father and, through the Holy Spirit, make it whole in all the ages to come.

Altar server: Yes, Lord, let it be so.

The host is given, placed on the tongue. The believer is touched lightly with the fingers of the right hand on the left cheek, and it is said again:

Peace be with you.

Then the chalice is passed. The left cheek is again touched with the fingers of the right hand, and again it is said:

Peace be with you.

This is the transition from the priest's communion to the faithful's communion.

Of course, Holy Communion is not to be distributed at every Mass, but in any case it should not happen that the faithful proceed to Communion without an opening of the Mass. Now it may be that in some places the Mass cannot be read. Then it would of course still be good, even without celebrating the Mass, at least to develop the whole spirit of the Mass, so that - since the community will certainly demand the explanation of the Mass right from the start - the Communion of the faithful can at least be incorporated into the Mass action in spirit.

A participant asks whether the Communion of the faithful should also take place without the Priestly Communion.

Rudolf Steiner: The action can certainly be performed in an appropriate manner. It is not good if the communion of the faithful is brought about without the communion of the priests. The communion of the priests should come first.

A participant: What about the mixing of water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a given in actual alchemy, in that the human being - I only hinted at this yesterday by way of example - continually develops alcohol within himself as he needs it. Now, the human being is also 90% water column, the other is only incorporated in it. Therefore, in the chalice, we also have an image of the human being made of water and wine, in that you do not just take the wine, but the wine, which is a product of the human being, mix it with the water.

You can only unite with Christ by entering into the phantom of the physical human body. This is contained in the words: “entering into the physical earth”; and this is what man finds when he

physical, even when it is already corrupted in the physical, is linked precisely to Christ. Thus renewal takes place in union with Christ, which is there as a consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer asks whether words could also be given for the laying out of the robes in the sacristy.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course one could think of something like that, but I would actually like to warn against the danger of over-Catholicizing. The situation is this: if you take a missal in your hands today – the good missals include instructions for this – you will find an extraordinarily strong externalization. Every second, when the priest dresses or walks to the altar, he is doing something prescribed for him; he cannot escape the words contained in the missal. A Missa solemnis is, after all, something extraordinarily complicated, and only by first tormenting candidates for the priesthood to learn how to put together a mass, for example at Christmas, at Easter and so on, does one make it possible for the matter to proceed without difficulty. Otherwise, the composition of a mass, for example a Christmas mass, where many individual priests work together, would take an extremely long time to prepare, because everything is externalized and has to be coordinated. Now this is simply postponed to the time of the candidates, and later the priests can spare themselves the trouble, because it actually happens automatically. So it is precisely in the Catholic Church that it is the “catholic” that it has externalized everything, and one must go back to feeling one's way through the action of the Mass with such moods, as I have just indicated through the two fundamental sermons, so that one does not have to specify. And you have indeed given the priest the means to keep this alive in his mind, in the breviary, if it is used in the right way and is brought into the right connection with the preparation for and the celebration of the Mass. I would therefore like to warn against the fact that the matter is too formulaic. I must strive to bring back what is Catholic in the Ahrimanic externalized, to the original real spiritual. So I would like to warn against feeling too strong a tendency towards Catholicism. They would quickly end up on the same path that Catholicism actually took in the 5th century, but especially between the 10th and 12th centuries, where everything was really externalized. I believe that we would have to avoid that if we act correctly. So: do not go too far when formulating. Formulate what needs to be formulated, but do not go too far.

What I said yesterday and today, and what I may still have to say, offers the opportunity to experience the original spiritual dimension in a very concrete way, not just in a general, abstract way, but in a very concrete way, during the preparation, the celebration and the aftermath of the Mass. There it comes to life every day. We do not run the risk that the Roman Catholic priest does, namely – and of course one must express things as they are – when you celebrate the great lines of the rite, it is also a real process. What you perform as a rite is imprinted in the ether of the universe; and when you read the tenth mass, it is not the same as the first time. The first time you excite the vibrations in the cosmic ether, the tenth time you already place yourself in the vibrations; thus, more and more an objective arises. If you now permeate everything with formulas too strongly, you get the same result as when a Catholic priest performs the service. The actual rite breaks away from the person, but the rite that clings too strongly to the person causes a terrible hardening in the person: he repeatedly enjoys the same thing that he enjoyed the day before, he enjoys, so to speak, his own sputum over and over again. And that must be avoided. A participant: How should we understand 'to the right and left of the altar' at Mass?

[Rudolf Steiner's answer is only poorly recorded by the stenographer. See note.)

A participant asks about sobriety when celebrating the Act of Consecration of Man.

Rudolf Steiner: You can imagine how much more undisturbed the whole process of celebrating the Mass is when there is no nourishment at work within you. The Catholic Church has the idea that the consumption of the sacrament at Mass is made the first consumption of the day, with the exception of those who have dispensation because otherwise their health would be harmed. Now, the idea is that the mass is basically performed for others, so it is detached from the priest, so that the question of whether the priest should perform the mass on an empty or a full stomach is actually a personal matter for the priest. Of course, it has an effect on him, because he also has to read it for himself. Now he can arrange it in such a way as he needs for his own strengthening. He has to read the Mass every day. But if one priest says, “I feel the power of the Mass for eight days,” another says, “I feel it for a month.” This is true for the priest himself.

The act should be celebrated at sunrise, not at sunset. A mass at sunset cannot be considered a real mass for the cosmos. During the Christmas season, a mass should be read around midnight, at the transition from the descent to the ascent of the sun, between December 24th and 25th. This is how it is now; originally it was between December 22 and 23. This is now also correct in the Catholic Church. A mass is to be read at midnight between December 24 and 25, immediately where the sun begins to rise. A participant: How often should incense be burned during the ceremony?

Rudolf Steiner: Only one incense is necessary. But of course, if you want to celebrate the service solemnly, you can even do it up to three times. You don't have to limit it to a clever system. It is a process that develops. You must not ask: What difference does it make if I do it three times? - The first time invokes the process.