The oldest cultus, in which the Fathers performed transubstantiation in subterranean rock and earth temples and felt their bodies grow one with the Earth.
The Rock Temple Transubstantiation was the earliest form of the consecrating rite, practised by the initiates Steiner calls the Fathers. Withdrawing into caves and underground rock and earth temples, the Father celebrant did not merely change bread and wine, he felt his own physical body merge with the substance of the Earth itself, growing together with earthly evolution and drawing cosmic substance inward through every sense.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, while performing transubstantiation in the Earth Temple, in the Rock Temple, the priest experienced the merging of his physical organism with the whole Earth. That is why there is the rock temple and the earth temple. In truth, even when we live in our present ordinary earth-consciousness between birth and death, we must feel in reality one with that which surrounds us in the cosmos. And so it was during the whole earthly development of humanity. What transubstantiation, in conjunction with Communion, brought about in the ancient Fathers was that they now felt the physical organization in connection with the earth when they went into the rock or earth temple in order to grow together directly with this earthly evolution.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these lectures in Dornach in September 1924 to the priests of The Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded by Friedrich Rittelmeyer in Breslau on 16 September 1922. The Rock Temple Transubstantiation is the deep historical floor of their central act, the Act of Consecration of Man, the renewed Mass that Rittelmeyer first celebrated and that the community still performs daily across its congregations. Reading the lecture, a priest of the community can locate the present rite within a long descent: first the underground rite of the Fathers, bound to the physical body and the Earth; then the watery, etheric cultus of the second epoch; then the airy, spoken cultus of the third; and now the I-borne celebration of the fourth, in which the celebrant must consciously rebuild what the Father once received as a gift of the gods.
The practical use is orientation, not nostalgia. Steiner is explicit that the old rock-temple feeling cannot return, and that yoga breathing and underground caves are no longer appropriate. What carries forward is the demand. Thalira synthesis: where the Father grew passively into the Earth and woke as Alpha and Omega, the modern celebrant must generate that same union of body and cosmos out of his own waking I, so the rock temple becomes an inward gesture rather than a place one descends into. A reader using this entry can trace, lecture by lecture, how Steiner maps each of the four mystery epochs onto one of the four members of the human being, and why the physical-body epoch had to come first.
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