Among the documents that anthroposophists return to most often, The Christmas Conference for the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society holds a singular place. Cataloged as Volume 260 in Rudolf Steiner's collected works, it gathers the addresses, meeting minutes, statute readings, and lectures from the gathering held at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, from 24 December 1923 through 1 January 1924. Roughly twenty distinct sessions are recorded here, ranging from formal organizational debate to evening lectures of unusual intensity. The single subject binding them is the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society under Steiner's own leadership, sealed by the giving of a meditative verse he placed, in his words, into the hearts of those present. This study guide describes what the volume contains and how it sits within his larger output. It does not reproduce the lectures, which remain the property of their published translation.
Place in Steiner's Work
The Christmas Conference marks a turning point that nearly every later phase of Steiner's biography references back to. By late 1923 the Society had grown unevenly, the first Goetheanum had burned on New Year's Eve a year before, and Steiner judged that the movement needed a new constitution and a clearer spiritual center. What is distinctive is that he did something he had previously declined to do: he took on the presidency himself and bound his own destiny to the institution. He spoke of this as an esoteric act with real consequences for the spiritual beings connected to the work, not merely an administrative reshuffle.
For readers tracing the arc of the collected works, GA 260 functions as a hinge. The lecture cycles that follow it in 1924, especially the karma lectures and the courses for priests, teachers, and doctors, carry a quality of urgency and esoteric directness that Steiner connected explicitly to the impulse founded during these Christmas days. The companion volume GA 260a documents the subsequent constitution of the School of Spiritual Science. Read together, the two volumes show an organization being given both an outer legal form and an inner meditative foundation in the same gesture.
It also helps to recall what came before. The original Anthroposophical Society had been founded in 1912 and 1913, after Steiner's break with the Theosophical Society, and for the next decade he kept a deliberate distance from its day-to-day governance, preferring to teach rather than to lead. The fire that destroyed the first Goetheanum building on the last night of 1922 changed that calculation. A society that had drifted into factions, and that now had to rebuild its physical home, needed a unity of purpose it could not supply on its own. By stepping into the presidency at the Christmas Conference, Steiner closed the earlier period of detachment and opened the brief, concentrated final year of his teaching life. Understanding GA 260 in that light keeps it from reading as dry minutes and reveals it as the record of a decision he treated with the weight of a vow.
Themes and Structure
The volume opens with Steiner's welcome and the first speakers, then moves to the session of 25 December in which he laid what he called the Foundation Stone. This was not a physical stone but a meditation, a dodecahedral image of love spoken into the assembled hearts. The verse addresses the human being as a threefold creature of limbs, of rhythm in heart and lung, and of resting head, and asks each listener to practice spirit-recalling, spirit-awareness, and spirit-beholding. A reader meeting it for the first time will find an early passage worth pausing on:
Soul of Man! Thou livest in the limbs Which bear thee through the world of space In the spirit's ocean-being.
From there the proceedings turn practical. Several long sessions record the reading and clause-by-clause debate of the Statutes, including the principle that the new Society would carry full openness rather than any tendency toward secrecy, a point Steiner pressed as a demand of the age. Reports from national groups, questions about membership procedure, and the formation of the Executive Council, the Vorstand, are all preserved. These minutes give the volume a documentary texture unusual among Steiner's books: the reader watches an institution being argued into existence in real time.
Interleaved with the organizational work are lectures of a wholly different register. The session titled The Envy of the Gods and the Envy of Human Beings reaches into mythic and moral territory, while the closing address of 1 January, on the right entry into the spiritual world and the responsibility this lays on those who undertake it, sets the tone for the entire year to come. The structure of the volume therefore alternates between the procedural and the meditative, and Steiner clearly intended the two to illuminate each other. The Foundation Stone was meant to be the living heart inside the legal shell.
A practical note for students: many editions present the Foundation Stone Meditation as a continuous poem, but in its original setting the verses were spoken across more than one session and returned to in the rhythm of the conference. Reading the sessions in sequence restores that rhythm and shows how the meditation grew through repetition rather than arriving complete. Steiner also tied the verse to a second short passage on the turning point of time, the birth of the Christ being into earthly evolution, which he asked the gathering to hold alongside the threefold meditation. The two together gave the conference its devotional center.
One further theme deserves attention because it surprises new readers. Steiner did not hide the difficulty of what he was attempting. He spoke plainly of the destructive forces loose in the civilization of his day and of the cosmic sleep in which he felt many of its leaders were caught. The final lecture frames anthroposophy not as a private consolation but as a response demanded by the times, a way of meeting the abyss with clear waking thought rather than nostalgia. That seriousness, present throughout the closing sessions, is part of why the volume continues to be read as a charge rather than a relic.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 260. This page serves as a hub for those terms; each link leads to a fuller treatment:
- Christmas Conference
- Foundation Stone Meditation
- School of Spiritual Science
- General Anthroposophical Society
Taken as a set, these four terms map the conference itself, the meditation given at its center, the esoteric school established alongside it, and the legal body that resulted. A reader who follows all four will hold the essential anatomy of what happened during those nine days.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive at rsarchive.org, which hosts the published English translation alongside the original German shorthand reports. For a printed edition, search the publisher catalog at SteinerBooks, which carries the volume under its full English title. Because the conference minutes and the verse are tightly interwoven, the bound editions are valuable for showing the editorial notes that explain when each portion of the meditation was spoken.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper, you might:
- Browse the full Steiner glossary to see how the terms above connect to hundreds of related concepts.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find the 1924 lecture cycles that flowed out of this founding impulse.
- Begin with the single entry on the Foundation Stone Meditation if you want the meditative heart of the conference before its history.
However you approach it, GA 260 rewards slow reading. It is at once the record of a meeting and the planting of a seed, and Steiner asked that those who study it sense both the outer form and the inner light he hoped would shine from it.