The Calendar of the Soul & Astronomy

by Mary Stewart Adams

The Anthroposophical Society in America recently announced the completion and installation of the permanent display of Margot Rossler’s glass etchings of the New Images of the Sun Zodiac at the Steiner House in Ann Arbor, Michigan—an event that has been in the works for nine years, since member Lotte Emde so generously donated the etchings to the Society in 2000.

Leo

Such an event is fitting in this International Year of Astronomy, for as the scientific community celebrates the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope in observing the night sky and the attendant opportunities for discovery along those lines of research, the anthroposophical community meets this penetration of the physical cosmos with an artistic rendering of the soul-spiritual experience of that same starry world. And not a moment too soon, for the striving to renew a spiritual relationship with the cosmos can serve as a powerful and necessary companion if not antidote to the current scientific deeds that threaten to interrupt some very basic cosmic rhythms. Consider the activity of NASA July 4, 2007 in blasting the comet Temple I, the intended atom smashing of the Large Hadron Collider which was activated in September 2008, or this summer’s LCROSS Mission during which it is intended to blast a rocket into the Moon with a force of 9,000 km/hr, producing an explosion equivalent to about 2000 pounds of TNT [1].

The New Images of the Zodiac were created by Steiner contemporary Imma von Eckardstein and first appeared in the original Calendar of the Soul 1912/1913, an astronomical calendar of an entirely new order. On its cover page, the Calendar stated that it was for the year “1879 after the birth of the Ego” indicating that it would mark time not from the birth of the Christ Child, as is the practice with the universally accepted, three-century-old Gregorian calendar, but from the objective fact of the Mystery of Golgotha and the events of Easter. Consequently, the Calendar of the Soul cannot be fixed from one year of 52 weeks to the next, but shifts with the moveable feast of Easter, a cosmic experience revealed on Earth through the changing relationship of Sun and Moon with Earth each year after the Sun has crossed north of the celestial equator at the Springtide. The Sun arrives at this crossing point slightly earlier each year (this is known as precession), while the Moon has a changing rhythm that repeats only every 19 years, so the changing rhythm of Sun and Moon as well as the change in the number of weeks from one Easter to the next revealed that the Calendar of the Soul was meant for republication each year. As Rudolf Steiner explained to Society members in 1912, “Each one of you will be able to use this Calendar of the Soul every year. In it you will find something that might be described as the finding of the path leading from the human soul to the living spirit weaving through the universe.” [2]

Taurus

In the same lecture, Rudolf Steiner also explained that the new images which appeared in the Calendar represented the waking and sleeping of certain elemental beings, and that though the anthroposophical community would experience derision and mockery at using a calendar of unequal lengths, it was a deed that was not to be regarded as a sudden inspiration, but as “something organically connected with our whole movement.” [3] In something that is uniform and fixed there is the impress of death, he explained, but in what is unequal there is life: “Our Calendar is intended to be a creative impulse for life.” [4]

By noting that there are never 52 weeks from one Easter to the next, the meditant who uses the Calendar of the Soul is required to adjust the verses each year, and this not according to whim and personal preference, but according to cosmic positions and festival days. In the original Calendar this was supported by the small images representing the Moon as it stood in a certain sign of the tropical zodiac beside each day, and the new image of the Sun as it stood in each successive sign of the sidereal zodiac which was displayed at the top of each page. The entire Calendar was a demonstration of the necessity of weaving the soul mood of the human being on the Earth (through the verses) together with the solar and lunar moods as these celestial bodies moved through the cosmos (through the images). While we have been so hungry for spiritual substance that we have settled for only the 52 verses of the Calendar of the Soul, we are at peril of losing the very clear and deliberate cosmic connection it intended to foster by using it without the attendant solar and lunar images.

Capricorn

Further, if we can regard The Calendar of the Soul 1912/1913 as a bookend on the opposite side of Pope Gregory’s calendar of 1582, a reform which attended the changing relationship of the human being with the cosmos that resulted from the Copernican Revolution and the findings of Galileo, [5] then we can become more cognizant of the ongoing conversation that takes place between the human being and the cosmos, a conversation formerly led by the speaking of the stars which is now weighted on the side of what the human being is speaking back.

It took nearly 300 years for the entire world to accept the rhythm of the Gregorian calendar, although it was not intended to be a civil calendar at all. During that same passage of time, the unveiling of the physical cosmos came to the fore, and what can be referred to as the “speaking” of the stars moved to the rear, and the stars grew silent. Rudolf Steiner refers to this silencing of the stars as the “slaying of Isis” when Isis is known as “the divine Sophia, the wisdom that sees through the world and enables man to comprehend the world.” According to Rudolf Steiner, “when we look out into the world’s spaces, the world’s ocean, and see the stars moving only according to mathematical lines, then we see the grave of the world’s spiritual essence; for the divine Sophia, the successor of Isis, is dead” [6], slain by Lucifer through the thoughts regarding the physical cosmos that result from a purely mathematical or technological approach. The Calendar of the Soul revivifies the soul experience of the cosmos that is lost in this practice of our modern astronomers and supports an active moral conscience which must attend our current, technological reach into the surrounding cosmic world.

Notes:

1. http://science.nasa.gov

2, 3, 4. “Calendar of the Soul” lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Cologne, 7th May, 1912

5. Pope Gregory XIII (1502–1585) introduced the Gregorian Computation in 1582, when Galileo (1564–1642) was 18 years old. It wasn’t until the 1600s that January 1 was reckoned as the beginning of the New Year.

6. “The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia” lecture II given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, 24th December, 1920