Steiner's name for supersensibly grounded ritual and symbol: the synthetic, reuniting element of religious life that builds community where teaching content divides it.
The Cultus in Anthroposophy is the ritual, sacrament, and symbol of religious life that Rudolf Steiner treated as a real supersensible action rather than decoration. In his GA 342 lectures of June 1921 in Stuttgart, given to the young theologians who founded The Christian Community, Steiner drew a sharp line between the cultus and teaching content. Teaching content, he said, works only when attuned to each listener's understanding, so it individualizes and atomizes a congregation until everyone forms a private church in their own heart. Cult, symbol, and ritual, by contrast, are synthetic and reuniting: they gather people into shared inner community. Steiner held that an authentic cultus cannot be arbitrarily invented but must be read from the spiritual constitution of the human being and the cosmos, and that in the present age only anthroposophy can renew its forms.
The Cultus is Rudolf Steiner's term for the ritual, sacrament, and symbol at the heart of religious practice, treated not as decoration but as a real action drawn from the supersensible world. Where the spoken teaching addresses each listener's private understanding, the cultus gathers people into a shared inner life. Steiner set it out for the founders of The Christian Community in his June 1921 Stuttgart lectures.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Protestant development of the last few centuries has led to the development of the cultus being transferred to the actual teaching content. The teaching content is now that which tends to have an effect only when it is attuned to the understanding of the listener or reader. That is why Protestant churches face the danger of atomization, the danger that everyone forms their own church in their hearts, and precisely because of this no community can be formed. The teaching content individualizes and analyzes the community until one finally arrives at the individual human being. Cult, symbol, and ritual are synthetic and reuniting.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave the GA 342 lectures to a circle of young theologians who, fifteen months later, founded The Christian Community (Die Christengemeinschaft) in Dornach on 16 September 1922. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Berlin preacher who left the Lutheran church, became its first leader, and Emil Bock, who pressed Steiner with questions across these very lectures, became one of its central priests. Their request was exact: they could not, they told Steiner, create the new form of worship on their own. What they received was the renewed cultus, above all The Act of Consecration of Man (Die Menschenweihehandlung), a sacramental Mass celebrated to this day in Christian Community congregations from Stuttgart to North America.
The movement took up Steiner's claim that the cultus is not symbolism invented to dress a concept but a real action read from the spiritual constitution of the human being and the cosmos. Where a sermon reaches only the mind it is tuned to, the sacrament works on the whole congregation at once. Thalira synthesis: the cultus is the social technology of the supersensible, a rite engineered so that what cannot be argued into a person can still be received in common, which is why Steiner trusted ritual, and not better preaching, to heal the atomization he saw in modern religious life.
Where to Read More
- Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work, Vol. I, GA 342
- Find at SteinerBooks
- Austin Osman Spare: Sigil Magic, the Zos Kia Cultus, and His Art
- The Dreamcatcher: Spiritual Meaning, Ojibwe Origins, and Cultural Significance
- The Mystery of Numbers by Annemarie Schimmel: Sacred Number Symbolism Across Cultures