Steiner's name for anthroposophical community work as the inverse of sacramental ritual: instead of bringing the spirit down, it lifts gathered souls upward into the supersensible.
The Reverse Cultus in Anthroposophy is the inward, upward gesture of community building that Rudolf Steiner set as the polar opposite of the sacramental cultus. Where a religious cultus projects supersensible beings and processes down into physical words and ritual acts, the reverse cultus lifts the souls of those gathered up into the supersensible world. Steiner introduced it in Awakening to Community (GA 257, 1923), in the Lecture IX blackboard passage where he draws the line dividing the sense world from the supersensible. The sacramental congregation, he says, draws the angels of heaven down to the altar, while the anthroposophical group raises human souls so that they may enter the company of angels. Both gestures build genuine community. A study circle enacts the reverse cultus when shared, idealistic thinking awakens one soul in the encounter with another and lifts the whole group toward spirit.
The Reverse Cultus is Rudolf Steiner's term, coined in 1923, for the way an anthroposophical group builds community by raising the souls of its members into the spiritual world, the exact mirror image of a sacramental cultus, which brings supersensible beings and processes down into physical words and acts. The same threshold is crossed, in the opposite direction.
In Steiner's Own Words
The cultus brings the super-sensible down into the physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into the super-sensible. Where it exists and groups of this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society, there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community building element. The community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels.
What it Means Today
The reverse cultus is not a relic of 1923. It is the working principle of every anthroposophical branch and study circle, and the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach was built to carry it. When Steiner spoke these words, Friedrich Rittelmeyer had just helped found the Movement for Religious Renewal, later the Christian Community, whose Act of Consecration of Man supplies the sacramental cultus that draws the spirit down. Steiner did not want the Anthroposophical Society to copy that. He wanted its opposite: people reading, thinking, and speaking together so that, in his phrase, "I want to wake up in the encounter with my fellowman." The 1923 Stuttgart conferences, held weeks after the first Goetheanum burned on New Year's Eve, were where this distinction was forced into the open.
You can test the principle in any room. A lecture that pours doctrine over passive listeners does not build the reverse cultus, no matter how true the content. What builds it is shared idealistic attention, where one person's wakefulness rouses another's, until a real communal being descends over the group as the genius of a language hovers over those who speak it. Thalira synthesis: the reverse cultus is best read not as a ritual at all but as a discipline of mutual awakening, the precise inversion of priesthood, where the gathered souls themselves do the lifting that an altar would otherwise do for them.
Where to Read More