The autumn festival of Michael, the Archangelic Sun-Spirit, observed on 29 September as the soul's answer to nature's dying back.
Michaelmas in Anthroposophy is the autumn festival of Michael, the Archangelic Sun-Spirit and current cosmic Time-Spirit since 1879, observed on 29 September and systematized by Rudolf Steiner in GA 223, The Cycle of the Year as a Breathing Process of the Earth, and GA 229, The Four Seasons and the Archangels, both Dornach lecture cycles given in 1923, the year of the Christmas Conference re-founding of the Anthroposophical Society. The festival cultivates will-courage at the moment the Earth begins to in-breathe its soul-element. As outer nature withers, the cosmic iron-process in human blood meets the dragon-force of summer sulphurisation, and Michael asks of the soul an inner deed answering the outer dying. Modern practice lives in Waldorf school assemblies, in the Christian Community's Michaelmas Act of Consecration, and in private meditation on Michael's casting of the dragon from heaven.
Michaelmas is the anthroposophic autumn festival, kept on 29 September, the calendar day Steiner inherited from the medieval feast of Michael and re-spiritualised. It is the moment the Earth-soul begins its in-breath, when summer's outflowing forces draw back and the human being is asked to meet the dying year with strengthened self-consciousness instead of nature-consciousness. The festival sits opposite Easter on the cosmic-year wheel.
In Steiner's Own Words
As one celebrates the birth of the Redeemer at Christmas, as one celebrates the death and resurrection of the Redeemer at Easter time, as one celebrates the cosmic outpouring of human souls into the worlds at St. John's time, so one should celebrate at Michaelmas time, if the Michaelmas festival is really to be understood, that which lives spiritually in the process of sulfurization and in the meteorization process of man, which in particular is to stand before human consciousness in all its soul-spiritual significance at Michaelmas time.
What it Means Today
Michaelmas as the anthroposophic year-festival has one specific contemporary home that the medieval feast did not produce: the Christian Community, founded in Dornach in September 1922 with Steiner's collaboration, where every Michaelmas season the Act of Consecration of Man is celebrated with the festival's proper readings and altar colours. This is the festival's first sacramental form after Steiner. Friedrich Rittelmeyer and the founding priests took the cosmic Michaelology of GA 223 and GA 229 and gave it a living ritual life, not a re-imagined medieval one. The Christian Community's Michaelmas is therefore the place to see what Steiner meant by a renewed festival rather than an inherited one.
Alongside the sacramental form, two practitioner streams keep the festival living. Waldorf schools, starting from the first school in Stuttgart in 1919, hold a yearly Michaelmas assembly in which older grades stage the legend of Michael and the dragon, the iron-meteorites of the Perseid stream are spoken of, and apples and the year's first bread are shared with the lower grades. The anthroposophic meditant works privately with the Michael verses Steiner left behind and with the imagination of the meteoric iron sword forged from the iron that falls into the Earth's atmosphere each August. Sergei Prokofieff's research on the Michaelic stream, written from the Goetheanum, has been the standard twenty-first-century reading on how this festival differs from any pre-Christian harvest rite or post-Reformation quarter-day. The festival is not a harvest thanksgiving. It is the cosmic moment when the soul takes responsibility for what nature can no longer carry alone. Steiner gave the soul's relationship to Michaelmas and the turning year enduring meditative form in the Calendar of the Soul, whose autumn verses speak of the spirit waking as nature sleeps. The Michaelmas festival gives outward form to the Michael imagination of autumn.
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