The week-long gathering at the Goetheanum, December 25 to 31, 1923, at which Rudolf Steiner re-founded the Anthroposophical Society and laid the Foundation Stone Meditation into members' hearts.
The Christmas Conference (German: Weihnachtstagung) was the gathering Rudolf Steiner convened at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, from December 25 to 31, 1923, at which he re-founded the General Anthroposophical Society and personally took on its leadership. At the centre of the proceedings he laid the Foundation Stone Meditation, a four-part mantric verse, into the hearts of members. This act gave anthroposophy a karma-bearing esoteric core distinct from any prior society.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us ever remain aware of this Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, formed today. In all that we shall do, in the outer world and here, to further, to develop and to fully unfold the Anthroposophical Society, let us preserve the remembrance of the Foundation Stone which we have today lowered into the soil of our hearts. Let us seek in the threefold being of man, which teaches us love, which teaches us the universal Imagination, which teaches us the universal thoughts; let us seek, in this threefold being, the substance of universal love which we lay as the foundation, let us seek in this threefold being the archetype of the Imagination according to which we shape the universal love within our hearts, let us seek the power of thoughts from the heights which enable us to let shine forth in fitting manner this dodecahedral Imagination which has received its form through love!
What it Means Today
Within esoteric Christianity, the Christmas Conference is the constitutive event of anthroposophy as a living spiritual stream rather than a society of opinion. Steiner had founded the original Anthroposophical Society in 1913, but had kept his own esoteric leadership formally separate from its administration. In December 1923 he reversed that separation. By becoming First Chairman of the re-founded Society, he bound his own spiritual responsibility to the karma of the members who freely chose to take their place around the Foundation Stone. The Society after Christmas 1923 is therefore not the same organism it was before, and the Foundation Stone Meditation is its inner law.
For a practitioner today, this means the meditation is not a historical artifact to admire. It is the working mantra of anyone who chooses anthroposophy as a path. Spoken slowly, the four panels move attention through the limbs (spirit-recalling), the heart and lung (spirit-awareness), the resting head (spirit-beholding), and finally the Christmas night itself, where the Light of Christ enters the darkness at the turning point of time. The verse engages thinking, feeling, and willing as one cohesive act. To sit with it daily is to take up the work Steiner laid down on Christmas morning of 1923, when he asked members to carry the stone of love through the world. Working close to Steiner through the Christmas Conference and beyond, Friedrich Rittelmeyer co-founded The Christian Community in September 1922 and led it as first Erzoberlenker. The conference founded the General Anthroposophical Society, the open public body whose statutes Steiner read aloud over the five days of meetings. At its esoteric heart the conference established the School of Spiritual Science, the Free High School conceived in three classes with Steiner as its leader. The whole event took place around the burnt ruin of the first Goetheanum, whose loss on New Year's Eve 1922 gave the refounding its peculiar gravity.
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