The summer-solstice festival of 24 June when the Earth, in Steiner's reading, has fully out-breathed her soul into the cosmos and the human soul disperses outward toward the stars.
St John's Tide in Anthroposophy is the summer-solstice festival on 24 June, the Nativity of John the Baptist, when Rudolf Steiner taught that the Earth completely exhales her soul-element into cosmic space. In The Cycle of the Year (GA 223, Dornach 1923) Steiner places it as the polar opposite of Christmas. At midsummer the Christ-permeated Earth-soul saturates itself with the forces of the Sun and the stars, and the human being who keeps awake to it disperses outward into the cosmos rather than withdrawing inward. John the Baptist's gesture, "He must increase, I must decrease," becomes the year-cycle's outward turn from self toward Christ. Steiner addresses the festival across three lecture cycles: GA 223 (the breathing-process of the Earth), GA 224 (the human soul in its connection with divine-spiritual individualities), and GA 229 (The Four Seasons and the Archangels, where Uriel emerges in the midsummer sky as the bearer of cosmic Intelligence).
In Steiner's Own Words
If we carry further our view of the Earth's breathing process during the course of the year, we find the Earth in yet a third condition in June. At this place which we are observing, the Earth has completely exhaled. The entire soul-element of the Earth has been poured forth into cosmic space; it is yielded up to cosmic space and is saturating itself with the forces of the Sun and the stars. The Christ, Who is joined with this soul-element of the Earth, now unites His force also with the forces of the stars and the Sun, surging there in the Earth-soul that is given over to the cosmic All.
What it Means Today
The festival is kept liturgically in The Christian Community, the renewal of religious life founded with Steiner's counsel in September 1922 under Friedrich Rittelmeyer. Its Johanni-Zeit cycle places the Act of Consecration of Man within the colour and gesture of midsummer for the weeks bracketing 24 June. The altar vestments and the spoken sequence of the liturgy carry the year's outward turn into the sacrament itself, so that what Steiner describes cosmically in GA 223 becomes ritually enactable for a congregation. For Anthroposophical practitioners who do not attend the Christian Community, the same threshold is held by the Goetheanum Midsummer bonfire at Dornach and by the long-running outdoor festivals at Järna (Sweden) and Spring Valley (New York), where the leap across the fire is read in Steiner's sense as the soul's brief, conscious crossing into the cosmic sphere before returning to the Earth.
The practitioner gesture Steiner asks of the festival is not a feeling of warmth or holiday but an inner imitation of John's "He must increase, I must decrease." Where Christmas asks the soul to gather, St John's Tide asks the soul to release. Sergei Prokofieff's research on the Baptist (The Heavenly Sophia and the Being Anthroposophia, 1996) reads John's beheading as the moment his I-being became the etheric group-spirit of the twelve disciples, the spiritual condition that makes the outward dispersion of the year-cycle bearable for a human consciousness. The festival is therefore the deepest summer-Christ mystery, not a folk celebration of light, and it asks of the practitioner the same that John asked of himself: a willed stepping-back so that the etheric Christ working in the cosmic surroundings can be perceived. The midsummer mood of St John's Tide opens the high-summer verses of the Calendar of the Soul, where the human self pours out into the radiant expanse of the cosmos. St John's-tide stands at the height of the sulphurising of summer.
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