The renewed Christian sacrament of the altar given by Rudolf Steiner to the founding priests of The Christian Community in Dornach, September 1922, celebrated daily worldwide ever since.
Act of Consecration of Man in Anthroposophy is the renewed Christian sacrament of the altar, in German die Menschenweihehandlung, that Rudolf Steiner gave to the founding priests of The Christian Community in Dornach on 16 September 1922. Its mature ritual exposition belongs to the priest-courses (GA 343 to GA 346, 1921 to 1924), with the founding-week course preserved as GA 344. The rite has four panels: Gospel reading, Offering, Transubstantiation, and Communion, each carried by epistles, mantric verses, and exact ceremonial action. It is celebrated by ordained priests of The Christian Community, men and women since the founding, so that the Christ-Impulse can enter the consciousness-soul-age human in a sacramental form the older liturgies could no longer hold. About 350 congregations across roughly 30 countries hold it daily.
The Act of Consecration of Man is the central sacrament of The Christian Community, the religious-renewal movement founded under Steiner's guidance in September 1922. It is the renewed Eucharist: a four-part ritual in which bread and wine are consecrated and offered so that the Christ-Impulse, which entered earthly history through the Mystery of Golgotha, can work bodily and soul-warm into the modern human being.
In Steiner's Own Words
The fact that they tried to do this is connected with the experiences which priests had during the transubstantiations. A transubstantiation consists of a transformation of the given earthly materials. If one wants to understand the process completely one should add the communion or the ingestion of the transformed substances by the human being to it, so that actually the two last parts of the act of consecration of man, transubstantiation and communion, constitute a unity, whereas the gospel reading and the offering are a preparation for them. Taking transubstantiation and communion as a unified priestly or cultic act, let's look at a view which the initiates we call fathers had in the oldest mysteries.
What it Means Today
The Act of Consecration of Man is not a thought-experiment or a private devotion. It is celebrated, in physical churches, somewhere in the world, every morning. The largest single living interpretation of its inner content is Sergei O. Prokofieff's The Eucharist (Temple Lodge, 2010), which traces each of the four panels back through Steiner's priest-course indications to the moments in the Christ-life they sacramentally re-present. The Gospel reading carries the Word that became flesh; the Offering carries the human contribution of bread and wine, fruit of earth and human work; the Transubstantiation carries the moment of the Last Supper and the substance-change that proceeds from the Christ-Being; the Communion carries the entering of that substance into the bodily life of the participant.
Steiner's claim, repeated through GA 343 to GA 346, is that the older sacramental forms, however genuinely founded, had become calcified by the start of the consciousness-soul age. The Christ-Impulse needed a renewed vessel that could meet the modern human who thinks, feels, and wills as an awakened I-being, not as a member of a pre-conscious sacramental community. The Act of Consecration of Man is that vessel. As a practitioner thing it asks one straightforward question: is there a Christian Community congregation near you. Roughly 350 exist across about thirty countries as of 2025, with the largest concentrations in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and North America. The rite cannot be read about into experience; it has to be attended.
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