The Rose-Cross is Steiner's built meditative image: red roses wreathing a black wooden cross, purified life crowning the lower nature overcome.
The Rose-Cross Symbol in Anthroposophy is a deliberately constructed meditative image, a dead black wooden cross wreathed in living red roses, which Rudolf Steiner set out as the opening exercise of the Rosicrucian path of knowledge. He gave its construction in Occult Science: An Outline (1910) and walked through it step by step in the eighth lecture of Macrocosm and Microcosm (GA 119), delivered at Vienna on 28 March 1910. The black wood is what the plant leaves behind once its green sap has died and lignified. The red rose is that same sap raised and purified, standing for human blood mastered by the higher nature. The picture copies nothing that grows anywhere, and that absence is the working part: mirroring no outer fact, it gives the soul nothing to reflect, so the soul must exert the picture-making activity from which the organs of Imaginative cognition are formed.
The Rose-Cross is not an emblem to be admired but a piece of inner equipment. Steiner asks the student to build the picture rather than receive it: contemplate the chaste green sap of the plant, then human blood carrying appetite and passion, then that sap reddening in the rose. The finished image holds both poles at once, dead wood below and purified life above.
In Steiner's Own Words
And if we associate the wreath of roses with the dead, black, wooden cross, with what the plant leaves behind when it dies, then we have in the Rose-Cross a symbol of man's victory of the higher, purified nature over the lower. In man, unlike the plant, the lower nature must be overcome. The red rose can be for us a symbol of the purified red blood. But the rest of the plant cannot be an emblem in this sense for there we must picture that the sap and greenness of the plant have lignified. In the black wooden cross we have therefore the emblem of the vanquished lower nature, in the roses the emblem of the development of the higher nature.
What it Means Today
Roberto Assagioli, the Italian psychiatrist who founded psychosynthesis, handed twentieth-century psychotherapy an exercise called The Blossoming of the Rose, printed in his 1965 manual Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques. The practitioner holds a closed rosebud in imagination and watches it open, petal by petal, into full flower. The value lies in the effort of picturing, not in the accuracy of the picture. Nothing is observed; something is made. That is Steiner's claim in Vienna fifty-five years earlier, where he met the obvious objection, that red roses do not grow on dead wood, by answering that an image replicating an outer fact would leave the soul in its ordinary reflecting habit.
The two exercises part company on one point. Assagioli's rose opens and the black wood is absent. Steiner's picture refuses to drop the wood: the cross stays dead and visible under the flowers, so the meditant carries the cost of the transformation and not only its bloom.
Thalira synthesis: the Rose-Cross is a two-handed image, and neither hand may open. Practised as roses alone it becomes a mood, practised as the cross alone it becomes resignation. The instruction in GA 119, repeated in the second part of Occult Science, is to hold the dead wood and the living red in one act of picturing, then to clear the picture away and attend only to the activity that made it. The exercise is finished not when the image is vivid but when the image can be let go.
Where to Read More
- Macrocosm and Microcosm, GA 119
- Find Macrocosm and Microcosm at SteinerBooks
- Find Occult Science: An Outline at SteinerBooks
- Rosicrucianism: The Rose Cross Mystery Tradition
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos