עברית In the religious cultus, the participants don’t face each other, soul to soul, but the altar, where the priest performs the ritual in the name of the whole congregation. In the reversed cultus, each participant faces each and all the others and takes each and all into his heart and soul.
The Reversed Cultus of the Future
From Lecture Five: The Etheric Form is Alive
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The reversed cultus brings together, therefore, in a wholly new way, the basic elements from the individual path and from the religious cultus. In common with the individual path, it has the contents of Anthroposophy and the anthroposophical spiritual path as its foundations, and with the religious cultus it has this in common, that it takes place in the living presence of the celebrating community. It has the same communal ‘event’ character as the religious cultus. It creates a new path between the religious cultus in which the whole community comes together, but in the old way, and the individual spiritual path, in which the modern individual works on himself alone. It creates something wholly new: a fully modern community path, based on the new spiritual science, merging the individual spiritual path with the reversed form of the old religious cultus.
We must create it on the go, step by step, by means of our free spiritual activity as a community, as does each individual in her and his spiritual path. As the individual starts from his ordinary, earthly soul faculties, so does also the communal reversed cultus. The religious cultus starts with the most sublime religious revelation, the Gospel, and continues to the cultus that represents on the earth in the most immediate way, the spiritual cultus of the spiritual beings in the spiritual worlds. The opposite is true of the reversed cultus. The reversed cultus starts from the common soul and spirit faculties of ordinary modern people, and raises them step by step, to higher and higher spiritual levels. It is a free communal creation, renewed in each activity, and in each activity, it will create yet another variation of its communal praxis. And naturally it builds its practice on the foundations of an individual anthroposophical spiritual path, and it transforms them entirely and adapts them to the shared community activity.
The reversed cultus can also be described—if we want to keep to Rudolf Steiner’s comparison with the religious cultus—as progressing through four stages, that can be named after the stages of the religious cultus: Gospel, Offering, Transubstantiation, and Communion. In more common terms, this means that the community undergoes a process of gradual progressing and spiritualization of cognition from below upward, from the physical, to the etheric, astral and spiritual world.
The religious cultus has, beside the given form and content brought down to the earth from the spiritual world by Rudolf Steiner, also the Bible and Gospels as its given framework. If we compare it to the reversed cultus, we can ask: what is its given framework? In this case, we must create our own ‘Bible’ and our own ‘Gospel’ as a living individual and communal creation of modern spiritual science. But the ‘Bible’ and ‘Gospel’ of spiritual science are not the books of Rudolf Steiner, but the whole universe to which the books refer. Therefore, we must actually practice the difference between what Rudolf Steiner calls ‘the book of revelation’ and ‘the book of nature’: ‘In reality, everyone who is in the Anthroposophical Movement should feel that he can only understand his karma when he knows that he personally is called to read once more, spiritually, in the Book of Nature—to find the spiritual background of Nature, God having given His Revelation for the intervening time... the whole point was to guide the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction—to awaken once more the faculty to read not only in the Book of Revelation... From the very beginning, the Anthroposophical Movement had this “Shibboleth’’.’
Let us therefore courageously grasp this “Shibboleth” by its ahrimanic horns and beside ‘the book of revelation’ (which will always remain a fundamental pillar of our spiritual life), take again, through modern spiritual science, the whole ‘book of nature’ into our hands! But in this case, we have no book of revelation as a given inheritance from the past, and instead we have the presently living, infinitely creative and fathomless cosmic communion of future humanity with the whole universe. We stand as upright and free humans in the age of the Consciousness Soul, observe and experience the infinite cosmic vastness of the universe, and the key to decipher its spiritual mysteries is found in modern spiritual science; but it is not enough that it is found, it must also be used creatively. We must, therefore, if we keep to the terminology of the religious cultus, create the first stage of our communal cultus, which means, to create and ‘write’ our own ‘Gospel’, from the new ‘book of nature’, based on our human experience today. And we will call this gospel, for this reason, ‘the gospel of the physical world’.
When we face this tremendously uplifting task, the old and tired soul forces in us may rebel and seek refuge in the old traditions, degrading the books of Rudolf Steiner to books of revelation, as so often happens. But our young and creative soul forces would hear the creative telluric-cosmic call of this infinitely creative universe speaking in our young etheric heart.
And this cosmic-telluric call, which is the true call of Michael, described in our second lecture, awakens us to venture forth and explore these unknown cosmic mysteries of our lives. Our young heart will say: Infinitely great, sublime and immeasurable are the mysteries of the universe and of humanity that modern anthroposophical spiritual science opens before me, yet, unfortunately, all this becomes so fast—in my own being and consciousness—frozen and dead and inert, in the moment I grasp it with my ordinary intellectual consciousness. You must be really young, quick and aware, to grasp this sneaky intellectualism, because it happens instinctually, immediately, in each moment you grasp the world and its wonders with your old and cold intellect, reflect upon what you see and analyze, explain and represent it in your all-killing intellect. Then you discover—if you are fast and awakened enough—that the spiritual wonder of the universe is not at all simply ‘given’ to your consciousness and cognition ‘as it really is’, that is, in its infinitely creative stream of becoming, but rather, in your intellect it has been already transformed into the dead forms of your dead mind, which makes everything appear as it is, dead, frozen and finished.
This will be the youngest mature experience in the first stage of the reversed cultus: In my ordinary consciousness and cognition, the sublimely wonderful, creative universe dies; this is the first really living spiritual experience that we must have, if we truly take the first step on the spiritual path. We must experience: the living spiritual wisdom taken from the real spiritual worlds is buried in so many dead books and traditions of old Anthroposophy which I accumulate in my brain-bound intellect. You only need to read the introductions to The New Experience of the Supersensible and the first chapters of Cognitive Yoga, to realize what this actually means in the real practical spiritual path.
But in describing this experience, we have already begun to describe the laying of the foundations for the reversed cultus. It means to experience the ahrimanic forces of death that in the present age dominate our consciousness and life in the physical world. We must first of all use spiritual science in such a way, that it will help us to recognize, confront, acknowledge, resurrect and spiritualize these ahrimanic death forces. We call this process the creation of the ‘Gospel of the physical world’. We must be able to begin the reversed cultus by creating—in each time anew—a renewed variation of this active, earthly-human Gospel, as a true creation that is possible for the first time in this Michaelic age.
The religious cultus is a gift of humanity’s primordial past. The religious cultus is given as a gift of grace from the spiritual world, implemented repeatedly since the very first, original, Ur-Offenbarung was given to baby humanity. But the reversed cultus can only grow from presently still potential, unformed and unfinished, seeds of future human forces. These forces must be planted and fostered, cultivated and harvested by ordinary humans, working together in community, leading gradually, step by step from the earth below upward to the spiritual worlds. This is the great distinction between the two kind of cultus, that Rudolf Steiner makes in his above-mentioned lecture on the reversed cultus.
Another aspect of this fundamental distinction between the religious and reversed cultus, is that the higher and deeper our communal path leads us, already in the first stage of creating together “the Gospel of the physical world”, the richer will become also our meetings with our human partners. In the religious cultus, the participants don’t face each other, soul to soul, but the altar, where the priest performs the ritual in the name of the whole congregation. In the reversed cultus, each participant faces each and all the others and takes each and all into his heart and soul. In the reversed cultus, the path and goal alike are centred in the human meeting. In this way each person increasingly becomes for each other an awakening cosmic and human wonder and riddle, a living revelation of the mysteries of human fate and of the higher worlds. This awakening meeting will become, as Rudolf Steiner hoped for, ‘a germinating and growing process of awakening’, in which more and more aspects, forces and faculties of each soul will be stimulated, awakened and stirred into activity, and grow to ever higher and deeper levels of mutual, intimate, communal experience of the real spiritual communion.
If we work repeatedly to consciously awaken each other, and create together the gospel of the physical world, we will notice that it gradually transforms the subtle physical and etheric forces and bodies of the community. This subtle etherization will become more visible in the continued practice of the first stage of the reversed cultus. Fully conscious etheric senses and feelers, feelings, sensations, sensitivities and sensibilities will develop from within the self-conscious and active forces of the Consciousness Soul, not by external physical-sensual stimulation. Spiritual science, when it stops being a theory, and becomes a living force of conscious communal activity, enlivens the living spaces between each soul and the another, and leads to a healthy, timely awakening not only of the soul and spiritual faculties, but thanks to them, also the subtle bodily forces are awakened and spiritualized. It is one of the fundamental truths of spiritual science that the three higher spiritual members, Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man and the three higher states of spiritual cognition, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, represent the higher octave, the result of the spiritualization of the astral, etheric and physical bodies.
This fact becomes tangible in the individual spiritual path, and in the community its effect is enhanced by the united activity of each and all. These subtle experiences are among the first fruits of the communal activity actualized and performed in ‘writing and reading’ the gospel of the physical world. It has three interrelated aspects: the individual and communal, shared, etherization of the basic process of cognition, the deepening experience of the mystery of the true being of each other, and the growing communal experience and perception of the subtle becoming processes of a community’s etheric body. Let us look at the creation process of the gospel of the physical world more closely...
Continue reading about the next stages of the reversed cultus in lecture five:
The Etheric Form is Alive
The Twilight of Humanity and its Resurrection
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner