Everyone knows that Easter is a moveable feast, especially those with Spring birthdays which on occasion coincide with Easter Sunday. What Steiner reveals is that Easter is a fixed feast in the heavens! Easter is linked to a specific constellation in sky which is in position on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. Look in the sky during Holy Week and you will find that the Moon is Full some time during that week leading up to Easter Sunday.

Why is Easter on a Sunday? is another question that might arise. Other holy days in the Church calendar are fixed by a day of the month, such as the Feasts of the Assumption on August 15 and of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, as I recall from my Catholic childhood, which were rarely on Sunday. As kids we preferred holy days that were on a Sunday because for those we didn't have to go to Mass twice a week. The answer to why Easter is on a Sunday requires us to look at how the names of the planets correspond to the names of the days of the week, which will come later.

Why is Easter in the Springtime? Hmm, the answer to this question seems obvious to almost everyone, but they would be surprised to find that Easter was originally celebrated in the Fall. For a long time before Christianity appeared, the festival of the god Adonis was celebrated each Fall by Near Eastern peoples. A quick examination will reveal its links to the Easter celebrations which were to follow.

[page 3] To the accompaniment of songs and rites portraying humanity's deepest grief and sorrow, the god's likeness was immersed for a period of three days in the sea if the Mystery site was near the sea, in a lake if it was near a lake, or otherwise in an artificial pond that was dug nearby. For three days a profound and solemn silence took hold of the entire community. When after that time the idol was lifted from the water, the laments gave way to songs of joy and hymns to the resurrected god, the god who had come back to life.

The ritual conformed to the method used in ancient initiations where the candidate was placed into a dark tomb-like chamber in a coffin and was told that he was to undergo the experience of death and remain there for three days.

[page 4] On the third day, in a spot visible to the occupant of the coffin, a branch appeared, signifying life's renewal. The earlier laments gave way to hymns of joy, and the initiate arose from his grave with transformed consciousness. A new language, a new script were revealed to him, the language and script of the spiritual world. He was permitted to see, and did see, the world from the viewpoint of the spirit.

These rites took place in the Fall when the vegetation of Earth was dying away. The initiate was told that Nature was dying, so would he have his autumn and die, that he would experience this dying, that he would be born anew after three days in the spirit world, and this rite would allow him to experience this dying and reawakening in his own soul.

[page 5] The profound shock inflicted upon people by this old method of initiation — we shall see that in our day completely different methods are necessary — awakened within them latent powers of spiritual vision. They knew henceforth that they stood not merely in the world of the senses, but in the spiritual world as well.

The etheric body of ancient people was not so locked into the physical body as ours is now, and the shock of an initiate’s being buried alive was enough to liberate his etheric body which would be called back into his physical body by the Master after the three day period had passed. By the time of Golgotha the human etheric body was so tightly bound to the physical body that few humans could survive the entombment initiation through which Lazarus was guided with Christ Jesus's help.

Most people were not ready to receive such spiritual vision and thus they were led through less onerous rituals such as the Adonis one which took place in autumn, a pre-Christian form of Easter festival. One should not feel superior to these early people because similar spiritual rites, such as our Easter festival, provide acceptable avenues for approaching spiritual knowledge to those otherwise not ready in modern times.

What these early initiates, including Lazarus, experienced as death and resurrection in their soul, Christ Jesus would experience in his body. Unlike Christ Jesus, the initiates' souls, not their bodies, died to rise again to a higher consciousness and life.

[page 7] What aspirants to initiation experienced only in their souls, Christ Jesus passed through in the body, that is, on a different level. Because Christ was not of the Earth, but rather a sun-being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, he could undergo on Golgotha in the entirety of his human nature what initiates had formerly experienced only in their souls.

The people in the Mystery schools knew for millennia that initiates had died in their souls and been returned with newfound spiritual knowledge, so when Jesus of Nazareth received the great sun being during his baptism in the Jordan, they knew that what initiates had experienced in their soul would now happen in the body. What they had practiced in dress rehearsal for so long was going to be enacted on the world stage and become a historical fact.

[page 7, 8] In spite of Christ's bodily death, in spite of his dissolution into the mortal earth, the Resurrection could be brought about because Christ ascended higher in soul and spirit than was possible for a candidate for initiation. The neophyte was incapable of bringing the body into such profoundly subsensible regions as Christ did, so that he could not rise as high in resurrection. Except for this difference in cosmic magnitude, however, it was the ancient initiation process that appeared in the historic deed on sacred Golgotha.

Those people familiar with the initiation process were elated by the Deed, the great Mystery of Golgotha, because they knew that the sun being who could previously only be reached by the initiation process had become man in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Over time this living awareness dimmed in the consciousness of most humans and led to what we know now as the Easter festival in memory of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through long recitation of the events of the days leading up to that Deed, worshipers are put in mind of the great mystery enacted for all humanity. Instead of requiring a dangerous initiation to view the Christ being in the Sun, humans, all humans, are able to look back on the Deed of Golgotha to find the Christ. What formerly required a spatial access, looking to the Sun, now requires only a temporal access, looking back to the Deed on Golgotha.

(See Diagram at Right, page 9.) Today we look back in time to the Deed on Golgotha, the yellow cross on a hill, to find Christ. Before Golgotha, people looked out in space, along the red line, to find Christ in the Sun.(1)

How did these initiates know for certain that the Sun being had come into Jesus of Nazareth? Due to the evolution of human consciousness, humans could no longer find Christ in the Sun. To prevent our precipitous fall into materialism, the Christ being came to Earth to save humankind, allowing us thenceforth to find Christ on the Earth.

[page 9] Evolution had progressed in such a way as to make initiation by means of the old ritual impossible. Human beings on earth could no longer find Christ in the sun. For this reason he came down to enact a deed to which earthly humanity could now turn its gaze. This secret is among the holiest things of which we may speak here on earth.

Saul persecuted Jesus of Nazareth, seeing him as just another pretend Messiah. Saul was also a Hebrew initiate, having gone through the initiation procedure which had become so difficult to perform in his time due to the evolution of human consciousness, due to our fall into materialism. Saul could see the "Sun at Midnight" which initiates performed by looking down into the Earth in the darkest hour to see the golden spiritual rays of Christ flowing through the Earth from the Sun. On his fateful journey to Damascus, Saul saw these golden rays filling the Earth during the middle of the day, and he knew instantly that Jesus of Nazareth, who had just died on the Cross, had been the carrier of the Christ spirit, the Great Sun Spirit which had been expected to reach the Earth for millennia. Immediately Saul received the Christ spirit into himself, changed his name to Paul, and began to proclaim the Good News of the arrival of the Christ spirit filling the Earth. Paul's good news was that, without having to undergo an onerous and dangerous initiation process, every human being could thenceforth find and accept Christ into their heart(2).

[page 10, 11] The profoundly intimate rites of the Mystery sanctuaries now stood forth as an external, historical event. All humankind now had access to what was previously available only to initiates. No longer was it necessary to immerse an image in the sea and symbolically resurrect it. Instead human beings were to think of, to remember, what actually took place on Golgotha. The physical symbol, referring to a process experienced in space, was to be supplanted by the internal, immaterial thought, by the memory of the historical deed on Golgotha experienced within the soul.

As the centuries progressed humans no longer could experience autumn as the time of death and renewal and they began to look to Spring as the time of new birth and resurrection, when seeds remaining from a dead plant are burgeoning into new life.

Before proceeding further we must ask ourselves: What does it mean to be a moon person or a sun person? Steiner takes us back to about 9,000 years ago and tells us that a remarkable thing happened to humans at the age of thirty: they forgot everything which had happened to them before that time. People would keep records for those who reached thirty to help them remember their events before thirty. They were told that before the age of thirty only moon forces acted on them, but after that sun forces entered into them. He says that this is "Something that takes place in human beings around the thirtieth year today [and] remains largely in the subconscious or unconscious." (Page 10) The moon forces act as forces of instinct or compulsion and the arrival of the sun forces at age thirty bring a new sense of freedom. It had always puzzled me how the minimum age for a U.S. Senator came to be set at 30 years old, up until now. Clearly some unconscious knowledge of the onset of the sun forces led the drafters to establish that age. A Representative must be over 21 and can still be subject to compulsive moon forces, but a Senator is required to be filled with the sun forces and free from those younger instincts. The modern expression "going middle-age crazy" can be understood as the emergence into daily life, from a person's unconscious, of the dramatic sun forces of freedom.

[page 11] While the moon forces determine the human being, permeate us with an inner necessity so that we must act according to our instincts, our temperament, our emotions, in a word, our whole physical and etheric nature, the spiritual sun forces free us from this. They dissolve, so to speak, the forces of compulsion, and it is really through their agency that we become free.

It is as though every human is born into a lunar birth by the Father and then at age thirty experiences a solar birth by the Son (Christ). Thus, rightly understood, every human is twice-born, once at birth of the Father and a second time at thirty of the Son(3). These facts may seem strange to many who are encountering them for the first time, but this is true of much of Rudolf Steiner's works. To allay the skepticism of many he writes:

[page 20, 21] Only those who know it derives from such a reality as I have just described can grasp its true meaning. About such things spiritual observation does, after all, have something to say; and once it is spoken, I would challenge any unprejudiced researcher in a conventional academic discipline to prove that existing documents do not at every step bear it out. Ordinary science will confirm spiritual research, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain things transcending ordinary science must be brought to light since the study of documents cannot lead to a true understanding of human life.

Now we are in a position to understand the Deed of Golgotha in a new way because Jesus of Nazareth was born into the Sun spirit, his solar birth, when he reached the age of thirty. Whereas the initiates of the time received only the rays from the Sun being, Jesus received the Sun being, the Christ, fully into himself and thence the name Christ Jesus is more appropriate and used by those who understand the relationship of Jesus of Nazareth to the Christ being.

[page 22, 23] One person who still knew the sun forces and was able to let himself be guided by them was the Christ-bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them. For, whereas in the old Mysteries the sun forces could be reached only by looking up spiritually to the sun, it was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to receive these forces in his own body as they streamed down to earth. This I explained yesterday. The essential point, however, is that in his thirtieth year a transformation occurred in Jesus of Nazareth's body. It was the same transformation everyone experienced in primeval times, except that in those times only the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual sun entered into people, whereas here the primordial sun being himself, the Christ, descended into human evolution and dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This event central to all earthly life is at the root of the Mystery of Golgotha.

To understand this next part, one needs to review the first four stages of initiation. The first stage for a neophyte was to understand that he knew nothing about the human being and could not even claim to be one.

[page 25] That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment a person learned in this way to look inside himself, he experienced how he had been in pre-earthly existence, for then he knew himself to be a being of spirit and soul.

We are born into a human body remembering all the events of our previous existence, but by the age of five, all those memories are gone completely, only traces of unconscious responses may remain(4). If you personally can recall a time when you thought elves and fairies were real, perhaps while your mother is reading a fairy tale to you, then you have experienced a bleed-through, a memory of that spiritual reality which yet existed for you in early childhood. Soon after that you were taught your so-called "imaginary companion" was illusory and that you had to forget everything you already know about the world and start over fresh, focusing only on material aspects of the world.

[page 26] We all become acquainted with the kingdoms of nature from their spiritual aspect before we descend to earth. And while today people are encouraged to forget all they learned about minerals, plants, and animals, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, attempted to remember it. He was shown, for example, a quartz crystal, and then everything possible was done to remind him of what he had known about quartz — or about lilies, or roses — before he descended to earth. The knowledge of nature taught in the Mysteries was essentially recognition.

Re-cognition, re-membering, so many words we have for adding back, membering once again into our being what we lost during our early childhood. Once a neophyte had mastered this kind of re-collection of things from his previous existence, he was allowed into the Second Stage of initiation, the Temple Grotto of Man, whose chambers were threefold: thinking, feeling, and willing. Whereas the First Stage involved remembering of knowledge from the spiritual world, the Second Stage involved acquiring knowledge specific to an earth-existence, music, architecture, geometry, surveying, etc.

[page 27, 28] It was important for the novice of the second stage to realize that all talk of gaining knowledge by purely earthly means, except as it applies to geometry, architecture, and surveying, is nonsense. He realized that a genuine science of nature must consist of recalling pre-earthly knowledge; however, geometry, architecture, music, and surveying are sciences that can be learned here on earth.

The Third Stage involved entering the Portal of Death, requiring remaining outside the body for a time.

[page 28] When we die we discard our physical bodies and are no longer bound to them. we cease to respond to, and are henceforth free from, earth forces. But while we are still connected to our physical bodies, as was the case in the initiations of old, we must achieve by inner exertion something that in death happens of itself, namely freedom from the body; we must hold ourselves outside the body for a time. Initiation required that one attain strong inner forces of soul, by virtue of which one could remain free from the physical body.

During the Third Stage, the initiate learned that the earth does not build up the human body, but instead works toward its destruction, that the cosmos itself is the origin of upbuilding forces. After passing through the Third Stage, the initiate, freed from his body, was ready to receive the gift of sun forces called Christos. As a bearer of the sun forces, he became known as a christophor, a Christ-bearer, and realized how spiritual forces are at work even in the substances of earth. To study chemistry, one must be initiated into the Fourth Stage(5).

[page 30] For only when you are able to perceive by means of forces of the sun-existence will you be able to study chemistry.

With the fourth stage, the ancient initiate was ready for astronomy, a subject to be penetrated deeply rather than creating superficial descriptions of reality as modern astronomy does.

[page 31] The merely external study of the stars, based on calculations and the like, ancient people considered thoroughly trivial. For the stars are inhabited by spiritual beings, and these beings can be known only after physical observation and even geometry have been left behind, when one can literally live in the universe and know the spiritual nature of the stars. At this stage the candidate became one of the resurrected and could observe the forces of the moon and sun at work, particularly in their effects upon earthly humanity.

What does all this mean? What does it have to do with Easter? Consider what we have learned so far in these lectures: Ancient peoples received sun forces at age 30 and were changed so dramatically by this event, they could not remember who they had been before age 30. As humans evolved, they no longer received these forces so strongly or consciously, but those who did remember carried their knowledge into Mystery Schools where it could be preserved. At the turning point in time, human knowledge of receiving sun forces at age thirty was gone, lost and forgotten.

[page 31, 32] Humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not the power to whom the initiates had raised themselves in becoming christophors descended into Jesus of Nazareth and remained on earth since then, enabling people to unite themselves with it through Christ Jesus.
      Easter as we know it today is thus a link in the evolution of the Mysteries, and we can become aware of its true content only by reviving that evolution.

Easter must be on a Sun-day, we find out, because Sun forces arrive to us from the cosmos. All the knowledge of the initiates pointed to this, and today we have this knowledge presented to us in the Easter Festival by the arrangement of Easter on a Sunday during a particular arrangement of the Sun and the Moon in the heavens, namely, the first Sunday after the first Full Moon, after the Vernal Equinox — the first day during which the Sun shines on us for exactly half of the time and night is present for the other half. That is the constellation or positions of the Moon and Sun which are aligned and fixed as the time for us to celebrate the Easter Festival each year. Easter, as regards the positions of the Sun and Moon, is a fixed feast, not a moveable feast.

When humanity gained freedom, it lost these Mysteries, but it is now the time when humans have evolved to the point where we can re-collect, re-cognize, re-member these Mysteries, and this study of the meaning of the Easter Festival is a good place to start.

[page 33] The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear at the time human freedom started to assert itself, but the time to rediscover them has arrived. The Mysteries must be found anew, and we should be fully conscious that preparation to that end must now be made.

In Lecture 3, Steiner relates the details of how the days of our weeks are composed of the planets in this order: (6)

Moon (Monday), Mars (Tuesday), Mercury (Wednesday),
Jupiter (Thursday), Venus (Friday), Saturn (Saturday), and Sun (Sunday)

Then one must realize three things: 1) the Sun cannot directly influence our etheric body until its rays are attenuated by being reflected by the Moon; 2) the most rays are present when the Moon is Full; and 3) the Moon itself becomes the christophor or Christ-bearer. Now the pieces of the puzzle for the scheduling of the Easter Festival fall into place. The ancients imagined the Moon looking toward the Sun.

[page 46] The moon itself, they thought, then looked toward the sun, that is, toward the first following Sunday. In other words, instead of a christophor looking at the sun from his newly-gained vantage point in the moon, people imagined that the moon looked at the sun, that is, at its symbolization in Sunday. Thus we have the following sequence:

March 21: Full moon: Sunday

March 21 is the beginning of spring; the Earth's forces burgeon forth into the cosmos. One must then wait until the proper observer, the Full Moon, is there. The Moon then observes the Sun, making the following Sunday Easter. Our method for fixing Easter's date is thus an abstract vestige of what was once a thoroughly real Mystery procedure, one that in ancient times many people experienced.

Over time and the evolution of consciousness, people's memory of their living relationship with the cosmos dimmed, and "the autumnal Mystery of ascent was mistakenly combined with the spring Mystery of descent." (Page 47)

[page 47] Here materialism began to show its effects. For materialism not only gave rise to false opinions, it cast people into total confusion concerning things that had previously lent a kind of sacred order to human existence.

Nature in the autumn falls into decay, but, with our spiritual eyes, we can observe Nature rising into the spiritual world from the decay, thus the original Easter festival in the Fall. When nature arises from the Earth in Spring, humans are reminded of how they emerge from the world of death to descend to life upon Earth, thus the new Easter festivals in the Spring.

[page 48] In other words, precisely when nature was on the rise, human beings were reminded of their descent into the physical, while, when nature fell into decay, they were to reflect upon their rise, their resurrection, into the spiritual.

To sum up Lecture 3, Steiner writes:

[page 49] By proceeding from earthly Mysteries to cosmic Mysteries, from earthly knowledge to cosmic knowledge, we thus begin to recognize the year's inner structure as revealed through the festivals, even though much of the festivals' hidden meaning has been lost.

In my study of Rudolf Steiner's work over 30 years, I have at times bumped up against unpleasant people who call themselves skeptics. The only thing I have found these people to lack skepticism about was the certainty of their opinions. I have found these people throwing ridicule and scorn at the works of Rudolf Steiner while at the same time lacking any understanding of his work. I have heard that people who hate everything the United States stands for are destined to reincarnate in this country in their next life time. Perhaps something similar will happen to these skeptics: they will reincarnate and look at the work of Rudolf Steiner with esteem and reverence.

[page 51, 52] Although today it can hardly be said that we have already achieved true inner freedom and are ready to proceed with the next evolutionary step, still a significant number of people have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries has been less palpable than it was in earlier times. The fruit of these incarnations, although not yet ripe, is alive in peoples' souls. And when an age finally dawns that is once again more spiritual, the current ignorance will be overcome. People will then freely greet with esteem and reverence the spiritual knowledge and experience that can be achieved through modern initiation. For without esteem and reverence, neither knowledge nor humanity's spiritual life would be possible.

We have seen glimpses of how the arrangement of the Sun and Moon in the heavens is important for the Easter Festivals, and it is likewise important for guiding human spirits in the formation of their etheric bodies as they come to Earth for a new incarnation. In Ephesus this knowledge was especially important to Ephesian students whose service to their Goddess (called variously, Diana and Artemis) gave them the sensation of her saying, "I delight in all that bears fruit within the vast cosmic ether." (Page 53) The students were carried to the sphere of the Moon from whence they would return to Earth as if in a new incarnation.

[page 55] It was a pre-earthly state into which the student was transported, a state preparatory to the descent to earth. In the Ephesian Mysteries their self-elevation into the sphere of the moon was an especially vivid experience, which the initiates inwardly cherished, and whose content might be expressed in the following words:

Cosmic-born being, thou clothed in light
Strengthened by sun in the realm of moon's might,

Blessed are thou by Mars' creative ringing
And Mercury's swiftness, mobility bringing,

Illumined by wisdom from Jupiter raying
And by Venus's beauty, love portraying —

So that Saturn's venerable spirit-ways
Might consecrate thee to the world of space and time(7).

Through the above experiences, the Ephesian initiate will have been taken through the seven days of our week, or put another way, each week we go through takes each of us, at an unconscious level, on a trip through the Ephesian initiation experiences and bears fruit in our own human etheric body.

In 2012 I had the occasion to walk up the hill to the Acropolis of Athens, Greece where the famous Parthenon stands today, its ruins under re-construction but still displaying its magnificence for all to see. In fact, anyone in Athens can see a glimpse of the Parthenon, as our guide Dimitri told me and I was later to confirm as I sat in downtown Athens for lunch in an outdoor eating area. There, up to my left was the white marble of the Parthenon just barely visible. In 2013 I had the occasion to walk up the hill to the Goetheanum of Dornach, Switzerland. From the windows of my room in the Inn called Kloster-Dornach down the hill, I could see the Goetheanum sitting proudly on the top of a hill. One day during our conference, we walked up a nearby hill to Perceval's Cave where our guide mentioned that Rudolf Steiner had come up this hill after being turned down by Munich's city authorities to build his structure there. The guide suggested that it was on his trip up this same hill that he was led to consider the flat area on the top of a nearby hill as an ideal spot to build his structure. He found the owner to be someone for whom he had done a favor, and the man donated the land to Steiner(8).

The flat portion of land had been shunned by developers because it was known as the Blood Hill, the site of the bloody battle of Dornach in 1499. Steiner’s view seemed to be that building his center for spiritual study on that site would thereby redeem and sanctify the site. As I pondered the Goetheanum from the window of my room in the Kloster-Dornach, I realized that Aristotle must have walked around Athens looking up the Parthenon much of his life, a great architecture that had been started about 50 years before he was born. If Rudolf Steiner had been Aristotle in an earlier incarnation(9), then the site on the hill overlooking Dornach would have resonated for him as appropriate for his modern temple to the spirit, the Goetheanum, which has become a new Parthenon on the Acropolis (high point) of Dornach.

His magnificent architecture of wood and concrete was begun in 1913 and finished in 1919. A fire on New Year's Eve 1922 destroyed the building completely. That fire led Ita Wegman to inquire whether she and Steiner might have been present as priests at the burning of the great temple to Diana in Ephesus, and Steiner nodded his assent (op cit fn 9). Would a bonfire built to redeem the bloody hill not have been simpler and easier to do than building a huge wooden temple, I wondered. Perhaps, but somehow the temple burning was necessary. On the day the Diana temple burned, Philip of Macedonia's wife gave birth to Alexander, who was destined to spread his influence over all the known world, in other words, a great influence would issue all over the world from the burning of the Temple of Diana. Can we see that a great influence is spreading across the world following the burning of the first Goetheanum? Waldorf Schools, Eurhythmy, Architecture, and the study of Anthroposophy has spread to all corners of the Earth. Rudolf Steiner stood on the site of this destroyed building the next day and vowed that a new and better building would replace it and by 1928 that new Goetheanum arose and remains today as a modern Temple to the Spirit.

[page 63, 64] Just as the fire of Ephesus flared anew within the hearts of Aristotle and Alexander, after scorching the cosmic ether and revealing to the secrets that they compressed into the simplest of forms, just as they used the burning of Ephesus, so too must we — and this may be said in all modesty — be able to make use of what the flames of the Goetheanum carried out into the ether as the substance of our anthroposophical aims, both past and to come.   .   .   .   This world, filled with spiritual wisdom, has adopted the Goetheanum's cause, which was carried out by the flames. The Goetheanum impulses with which we imbue ourselves now stream in from the cosmos.

As we enter Holy Week each year, let us look out into the cosmos as a christophor, a Christ-Bearer, a cosmic being clothed in the light of the Full Moon building up our etheric body by light reflected from the Sun, filling ourselves with Mars’ life-stirring song and Mercury’s swift-winged agility, allowing Jupiter’s wisdom to flood over us, Venus’s beauty to shine upon us, and Saturn’s ageless devoutness to gather us together and consecrate our lives in this world of space and time.

---------------------------- Footnotes -----------------------------------------

Footnote 1.
The diagram on page 9 of this book also appears in Steiner's hand in Blackboard Drawings on page 146. Given the propensity of our time to think of time proceeding from left to right, I reversed the orientation for clarity, my own and others, so that in this diagram we look back to Golgotha to the left from our present time. In the ancient mysteries, initiates looked for the Sun at Midnight, looking down through the Earth to find the Christ Spirit, so the red line should, rightly understood, go down into the Earth.

Return to text directly before Footnote 1.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 2.
This material on Paul comes from Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha by Rudolf Steiner.

Return to text directly before Footnote 2.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 3.
On pages 21, 22 Steiner mentions briefly of the third birth by Saturn, which is a birth into the spirit world via physical death.

Return to text directly before Footnote 3.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 4.
The implications of this first came to me while doing research in the science of doyletics, and I wrote about it in my essay, The Childhood of Humanity.

Return to text directly before Footnote 4.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 5.
Steiner admits it would seem absurd to require a pharmacist or a chemistry professor to be able to experience sun forces before they could practice their trade, but in ancient times, that was exactly the case. Chemistry today is a shallow study based on descriptions rather than inner penetration of the subject. (Page 30)

Return to text directly before Footnote 5.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 6.
One must know the days in English, German, and French languages to get all the connections, e.g., in French: Mardi means Mars Day, Mercredi means Mercury Day, Jeudi means Jupiter's Day, and Vendredi mean Venus Day. In German: Wodin's Day is our Wednesday, Thor's Day is our Thursday, and Samstag is not Sam's Day, but seems to mean "Collection Day".

Return to text directly before Footnote 6.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 7.
In German Samstag is Saturday or Saturn's day. Sammeln means to collect or bring together in German, so I had for over four decades wondered what the reality might be for Saturday or Samstag being connected to collecting. On page 57, Steiner gives this expanded interpretation of Saturn: "So that Saturn may gather all together and complete our inner and outer development, preparing us to descend to Earth and to clothe ourselves in a physical body, so that we might live on Earth as physical beings who carry the god within us." I should note that my own birthday was on a Saturday.

Return to text directly before Footnote 7.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 8.
The details of how the land for the Goetheanum was acquired are laid out in Henry Barne's biography of Rudolf Steiner, A Life for the Spirit.

Return to text directly before Footnote 8.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 9.

As described in Rudolf Steiner's Mission and Ita Wegman by Margarete & Erich Kirchner-Bockholt.

Return to text directly before Footnote 9.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~^~ List of Steiner Reviews: Click Here!

Any questions about this review, Contact: Bobby Matherne

To Obtain your own Copy of this Reviewed Book, Click on SteinerBooks Logo below: