The cosmic being whose substance is the Sun's spiritual light and warmth, ruled by the Christ, identified by Steiner as the highest of the Elohim.
Sun Spirit in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the totality of the Sun's spiritual existence: the Sun considered not as a physical star but as a being, peopled by hierarchies who chose the Sun-sphere as their dwelling place. Steiner systematizes the picture in The Spiritual Hierarchies (GA 110, given at Düsseldorf, April 1909) and the lecture cycle Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (GA 130, 1911-1912). Three orders of beings populate the Sun: the Kyriotetes who reached their human stage on Old Sun, the seven Elohim (Spirits of Form) who remained Sun-bound after the Sun separated from Earth, and the seven Sun-Archangels who hold cosmic regency in rotation. The central Mystery of the Sun Spirit, for Steiner, is the Christ-Being who ruled the Sun-sphere until the Mystery of Golgotha and then united with the Earth.
The Sun Spirit is the whole spiritual existence of the Sun: not merely its rays of light and warmth, but the community of high beings whose deeds those rays carry. Steiner reads cosmic history as a long conversation between Earth and Sun, in which the Sun-sphere holds humanity's original homeworld through the Old Sun condition, and Christ as ruler of the Elohim crosses from Sun to Earth at Golgotha.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Elohim are those beings who remained connected to the sun when the sun separated from the moon and earth; they belong to the hierarchy called the powers, spirits of form, and from there upwards to the hierarchies. They are still within our evolution. Elohim is the collective name for the sun beings; at that time they had chosen the sun as their dwelling place, not as their sphere of activity. Christ, the highest of the Elohim, is their ruler. However, he does not belong to the hierarchies, but to the Trinity. In Christ we have an entity before us that is so powerful that it has influence over all the members of our solar system.
What it Means Today
The Sun Spirit is the term that opens Steiner's cosmology to esoteric Christianity without collapsing one into the other. The Sun Logos names Christ specifically as the cosmic Word of the Sun-sphere, the philosophical and Christological figure addressed in The Gospel of St. John lectures. The Sun Spirit names the whole spiritual organism that figure rules: the Elohim, the Sun-Archangels passing the regency between them through cycles of roughly 354 years, the Kyriotetes who completed their human stage in the Old Sun condition described in Occult Science: An Outline (GA 13, 1910). The Mystery of Golgotha is where these two pictures meet. Steiner holds that the Christ-Being departed the Sun-sphere and united with Earth at the Baptism in Jordan, completing the union at the Crucifixion, so that the Earth itself now carries what was once held only in the Sun.
The Christian Community, the renewal-of-religion movement founded with Steiner's help in 1922, has worked this picture into its Easter cycle: the Easter altar carries the Sun-Christ identification across the seven weeks from Easter to Ascension to Whitsun, a yearly retracing of the Mystery of Golgotha as a Sun-event. For the meditant, the practical entry is what Steiner called Sun-meditation, attending to the moral quality of sunlight rather than its physics, as preparation for the etheric-Christ perception he predicted would become possible from the twentieth century onward. The Sun Spirit, on this reading, is not a metaphor for a star. It is the cosmic interior whose substance is light and warmth as the speech of beings, and whose central Mystery is the Christ who came down from it.
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