The Revelation 12 figure robed in the sun whom Steiner reads as the soul giving birth to the higher I, the self that the dragon cannot devour.
The Sun-Clothed Woman is the figure of Revelation 12, clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, a crown of twelve stars upon her head, who cries out in labour while a red dragon waits to seize her child. Rudolf Steiner takes her not as a single person but as the human soul at the threshold of a transfigured future, bringing the eternal I to birth.
In Steiner's Own Words
Then we come to a repetition of the time when the sun was separated from the earth. The human being, together with the earth, will have advanced to the time when the sun again unites with the earth. The earth will pass over into what is called an astral state. Human beings able to live in the astral world will raise up the finer part of the earth and then be united with the sun. The portion of the earth that has remained coarse will be united with the moon to form a new kind of moon. The kind of conditions prevailing during the Hyperborean age will enter in again, but at a higher stage of evolution. This is characterized by the woman clothed with the sun and having the moon at her feet.
What it Means Today
Read this picture against the calendar of cosmic evolution and the woman stops being an allegory of the Church and becomes a portrait of what a human being is on the way to becoming. Steiner sets her at the close of the trumpet-epochs, when the earth grows light enough to be drawn back into the sun and the soul that has spiritualized itself rises with it. The sun she wears is the spirit-light she has made her own; the moon under her feet is the heavy, reflected, merely physical nature she now stands above; the twelve stars are the zodiacal forces matured into a finished selfhood. What she labours to bring forth is the eternal I, the self that, as Steiner says elsewhere in this same 1909 cycle, is born out of the womb of a higher spirituality. That birth is hard, and it is contested: the red dragon at her feet is every force in the lower nature that wants the newborn self swallowed before it can stand.
This is why the esoteric Christianity carried at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and by the Christian Community priests since their founding in 1922, treats Revelation 12 less as a forecast of dated events than as the inner law of becoming a free spirit. The work is personal and present-tense. A reader does not wait for the woman to appear in the sky; the labour she depicts is the daily effort to bring a true centre of self to birth out of habit, inheritance, and reaction, and to guard it from the dragon-pull back into the merely sensual. In Steiner's reading she and the adversary belong to one moment: selfhood is real only where something would devour it.
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