The thirteen nights from Christmas to Epiphany when, for Steiner, the earth-soul is most deeply in-drawn and the human soul most open to the spiritual world.
The Thirteen Holy Nights are the span from Christmas Eve to the night before Epiphany, January 6, when Rudolf Steiner taught that the least light reaches the earth from the cosmos and the earth-spirit contracts inward. In that contraction, he held, the human soul gains access to secrets normally veiled by the senses, the occult datum carried by the old Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson.
The Thirteen Holy Nights in Anthroposophy is the period from Christmas to Epiphany, roughly December 24 to January 6, which Rudolf Steiner described as the time when the earth receives the least light and warmth from the surrounding cosmos, and so draws its soul-life most deeply inward. In his lectures on Olaf Åsteson, given at Hanover, Berlin, and elsewhere between 1912 and 1913 and gathered in GA 158, Steiner read these nights as the seasonal counterpart of the summer solstice: where high summer drowns the soul in the macrocosm, the midwinter nights let the earth-spirit concentrate, opening the human soul to experiences usually hidden behind the senses. He framed the period through the Norwegian ballad of Olaf Åsteson, who sleeps thirteen days and wakes bearing knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a folk memory of an older clairvoyant relation to the year.
In Steiner's Own Words
Olaf Åsteson, Olaf the Earth-son, experiences many secrets of the universe in these thirteen shortest days, while he is absorbed in the macrocosm. And the Norse legend, which has been rediscovered in recent times from ancient records, tells us of the experiences that Olaf Åsteson had between Christmas and New Year's Day until January 6. And we have good reason, my dear friends, to remember this ancient way of integrating the microcosm into the macrocosm more often; our contemplation will then be able to tie in with such things.
What it Means Today
The text Steiner placed at the centre of these nights is a real one. The visionary ballad he called the Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson is the Norwegian Draumkvedet, a medieval folk poem collected from singers in Telemark and first printed by the pastor and folklorist Magnus Brostrup Landstad in his Norske Folkeviser (Christiania, 1853). In it, a man named Olav Åsteson falls asleep on Christmas Eve, sleeps through the thirteen days, and wakes on Epiphany having crossed the Gjallar bridge and seen the regions of the dead. Steiner translated the ballad into German for a New Year recitation in Hanover in 1912, and a year later, in Berlin, read the sleeper's journey as a folk record of how the older human being still lived consciously into the in-drawn earth at midwinter.
That reading still shapes practice in the anthroposophical movement. At the Goetheanum in Dornach the Olaf Åsteson recitation and eurythmy remain part of the festival year, and many Waldorf families and Christian Community congregations keep a quiet thirteen-night observance, one night for each coming month, between the Nativity and the Three Kings. Thalira synthesis: where most festival calendars treat Christmas to Epiphany as a stretch of celebration, Steiner treats it as the year's deepest exhalation held in, a single contracted breath of the earth in which the sleeping Olaf, not the waking reveller, is the one who learns.
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