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realize the extent to which people in those days understood the Christ impulse purely by
intellectual means, it is not surprising to find that there ensued an endless theological
quarrel. People argued whether or not Christ was consubstantial with the Lord in all
eternity, and so on. Let us say this, that the degree of knowledge of the Christ impulse
available to human beings in those days is not important, but rather the fact that the
Christ impulse was present and that through his dream it guided Constantine to bring
about what had to happen. What is important is the actuality of the Christ and His teal
and visibly active power. Only in the science of the spirit do we begin to understand what
the Christ impulse is.
Another historical event was the struggle between France and England. It changed the
map of Europe in such a way that we can say that if France had not been victorious over
England, all conditions and relationships would have become different. But how did this
victory happen? It happened because the Christ impulse has worked itself into the
subconscious of the soul up to the present time, when it is increasingly becoming a
conscious force. So we can see in the evolution of the Western spirit how the Christ
impulse seeks our in the souls of men those conditions by which it can become effective
in some individuals. Legends have preserved for us the manner in which the Christ
impulse can assert itself within the Western spiritual tradition. In part, these legends refer
generally to ancient pagan ages, but they take us back to those heathen times in which an
understanding of Christianity was beginning to germinate.
If the soul does not consciously seek initiation as delineated in Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds and Its Attainment, but becomes saturated with the Christ impulse as if by way of
natural initiation, then the most favorable period for this process is from December 25 to
January 6. We can understand this clearly by realizing that for occult knowledge it is
evident that the earth is not only what geologists describe. Geologists conceive the earth's
components as being similar to the skeleton of man. Yet the spiritual also belongs to our
earth whose aura has been permeated by Christ. During the day's twenty-four hours, this
earth sleeps and is awake just as we are. We must familiarize ourselves with the fact that
the state of wakefulness on earth occurs during the winter, and the state of sleep during
the summer. The earth spirit is most awake in these twelve or thirteen days from
Christmas to the Epiphany. In ancient ages when, as you know from the various
presentations in my lecture series, human beings elevated themselves to a sort of
dreamlike clairvoyance to reach a spiritual understanding of the world, in those ages the
most favorable tints for this process was summer. Thus, it is quite natural that whoever
wants to elevate himself to spiritual heights by means of a more dreamlike clairvoyance
will have an easier time of it during the summer, when the earth is asleep. Therefore, St.
John's midsummer-day was in ancient ages the most propitious time to raise the soul to
the spiritual level. The old way of spiritual interaction with the earth has been replaced by
a more conscious elevation that can best be reached during the earth's wakefulness.
For this reason, legends inform us that unusually endowed people, who are particularly
suited by their karmas, pass into an extraordinary state of consciousness that resembles
sleep, but only on the surface. its inner quality is such that it can be inspired by those
forces that elevate human beings to the domain we call the spirit world. A beautiful
Norwegian legend (see Note 2) tells us that Olaf Åsteson, in church on Christmas Eve,
falls into a sleeplike state and when he awakens on January 6 is able to relate the
experiences he had in this condition. This Norwegian legend does in fact describe the
experiences that one perceives first as the soul world - and then as something that feels
like the spirit world, but with everything being expressed as images, as imaginative
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