Steiner's twofold annunciation of Christ's birth: the Magi's dying star-wisdom and the shepherds' earth-born heart-knowledge, two polar paths meeting at Golgotha.
The Magi and the Shepherds in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading, given at Stuttgart on 1 January 1921 (GA 203, The Festivals and Their Meaning), of the two Gospel proclamations of Christ's birth as two distinct paths of human knowledge. The Magi from the East, schooled in an ancient star-lore preserved in the Mysteries, knew the heavens as a living spiritual world and read the descent of the Christ Being from the courses of the stars. The shepherds in the fields, through great purity of heart, received an earth-born revelation in a dreamlike clairvoyance. Steiner teaches that both faculties were last remnants of an instinctive clairvoyance fading at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Magi-wisdom has since metamorphosed into mathematical astronomy, the shepherd-wisdom into cold sense-observation, the two poles a modern path of knowing must reunite.
The Magi and the Shepherds are, in Steiner's Christmas lecture of 1 January 1921, the bearers of two opposite ways of knowing the world. The Magi read the birth of Christ Jesus in the stars, from a heavenly wisdom of life before birth. The shepherds felt it rising from the earth, through the heart. One revelation came from above, one from below, announcing a single Event.
In Steiner's Own Words
The mood-of-soul prevailing in the shepherds and in the Magi was in its final phase at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything in the evolution of humanity undergoes constant change and metamorphosis. What has the wisdom possessed by the Magi from the East now become? It has become our mathematical astronomy. The Magi possessed super-earthly knowledge which was actually a glorious remembrance of life before birth. This knowledge has shrivelled away into our mathematical-mechanistic conception of the heavens, to the phenomena of which we apply only mathematical laws. What wells up from within us in our mathematical astronomy is the modern metamorphosis of the knowledge once possessed by the Magi.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim that the Magi's living star-wisdom hardened into measurement, while the shepherds' heart-knowledge thinned into detached observation, found its fullest scholarly treatment in Owen Barfield, the British author and member of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Faber and Faber, 1957), Barfield traced the same arc Steiner describes here. He named the older condition "original participation," the state in which a person experienced the heavens and the earth as inwardly alive and meaning-bearing, and contrasted it with the modern stance that treats the same phenomena as dead, external objects to be counted. Barfield argued that Western consciousness moved from participation, through the alienation of the scientific revolution, toward what he called a future "final participation," in which the meaning once received passively must be rebuilt consciously from within. That is precisely the twofold task in Steiner's lecture: the Magi-pole, become abstract astronomy, must be inwardly enlivened toward an Imaginative knowledge of the cosmos, and the shepherd-pole, become bare sense-data, must be deepened until earthly observation again discloses spirit. Thalira synthesis: the Magi and the shepherds are not two characters in a Christmas scene but the two halves of one cognition, the heavenly and the earthly, that the modern knower carries split and is asked to wed.
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