12 HOLY NIGHTS OF CHRISTMAS

Daily posts from December 24, 2019, to January 5, 2020

The twelve holy nights of Christmas are symbols for the twelve forces of the soul that live in us. On these darkest nights of the year, we are closest to the Sun’s Spirit. We are invited to contemplate and reflect on the past year, and to envision the coming year.

“Again, without this being really recognized hitherto by science, these Twelve Holy Nights stand there, as though established out of the wise, with hidden depths of the human soul, as if to say: Experience the Christ-Festival in all its profundity.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

Due to the pandemic, we cannot offer in-person gatherings at our Auditorium on Holy Nights’ evenings this year. Instead, we are inviting you to read, listen to, and contemplate two series of texts:

• Contemplations inspired by indications given by Rudolf Steiner to Herbert Hahn, who met Steiner in 1919, and became a class teacher at the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart where Steiner also asked him to give “free religious lessons” to the children.
• Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8), a series of 12 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in the fall and winter 1901-1902 in the library of Count and Countess Brockdorff. These lectures were rewritten and issued in a book format in the summer of 1902.

Each morning, a new post will be published, containing the indication for each of the Holy Nights and links to the audio recording by Dale Brunsvold and to the lecture at Rudolf Steiner Archive. You can either visit this page each day, or download the whole set in advance: PDF with Steiner’s indications for the Holy Nights, the contents of the book from Rudolf Steiner Archive, and the recordings by Dale Brunsvold (both featuring the English edition from 1961 by Rudolf Steiner Publications, Inc.) The newly updated English translation by Andrew Welburn (with introduction by Christopher Bamford) is also available in the SteinerBooks edition from 2006, which you can get from our bookstore.