The Twelve Days of Christmas- Night Four

• The fourth night is the four angels of the four quarters of space

On the fourth night we give and are given 'space' to make ready our incoming actualities. The gift of the four is precisely this. Four angels govern and qualify and characterize the four quarters of all cosmic space and its infilling virtue. On this journey heavenward we are gathering up our provisions, and our first provision for that in our life to enter in anew, is the space to be present that it can. 

This is now the perfect night before retiring into slumber, to contemplate possibilities, to hang out our empty stocking as it were to be infilled! 

(Four calling birds [originally 'colley' birds - blackbirds, black as coll/coal])

-B.Hive

The Twelve Days of Christmas- Third Night

• On the third night comes the Holy Spirit

On the third night we return with our experience now of the Holy Trinity in action - as it works within our own personal creation - as the Holy Spirit inspires and divines the fresh life destined to be manifest.

Without the Holy Spirit we would be continually given over to ennui, and though nights one and two carry a certain measure of peace in the experience, this same peace now becomes also a supportive strength, enabling us to travel further upon the vitality of this mighty moving Spirit now known. (Three French Hens - the Trinity.)

So we have had our being sustained etherically, and then we have had our consciousness enlivened by our Christ as He examines all about us, and now through Him we can see also our Father's Divine Will as it motivates our life, the etheric life and all other life besides. Our chief concern on this night to contemplate is our own will and drive and fervor in the world. We may anticipate a sense of personal motivation becoming clarified within us. And wake to feel the spirit within us!

-B.Hive

The Twelve Days of Christmas- Night Two

• The second night becomes the meeting of two

On the second night we go to Him with the inner experience of the night before, before our soulic nature, becoming evident also to the ego. Just as the song 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' goes on to repeat itself and recap the earlier days within the current day, so our experience gathers over the twelve nights (during the global fourteen). Our experience shifts now from being unconsciousness to recollective and from that into further knowledge. In this we experience Christ also, whose presence becomes apparent through this self-conscious reflection.

He is apparent to us in all meetings. In this power of two we find a unity of self and Father, Father God and Christ. There is a peace experienced in this unity (two turtle doves). Our meditation on this night is of marvelous meetings - of conjunctures. Of meetings that will come to us also in the year ahead. May we be aware of not only the Great Ones' Presence, but of our being with them and our being together.

-B.Hive

The Twelve Days of Christmas- First Night

• The first night is of Father God

We go to Him and experience only Him. This is where we may come back with only an unconscious experience of Him and not of ourselves. This is His day. Every night we sleep we go to Him and replenish ourselves etherically. The pear tree examples this etheric life. He is at the apex of all life. We return with the blessings of this meeting. Before entering into sleep on this night we can hold before us the picture of the golden pear tree and its etheric splendor; knowing that when we arise to once again feel the senses within our bodies, to infill the limbs and circulate warmly; we have been to paradise and eaten His fruit that sustains us throughout all of the worlds.

-B.Hive

Threefoldness & Real Christian Social Life

The Christian socialism of the Sixth Race/Cultural Period is not to be compared with the past experiments in socialism.  Those past experiments in socialism were designated as Ahrimanic by Rudolf Steiner, in that it was a future condition implanted before its time. But that is the point: it is a future condition.

The importance of Brotherhood for the 21st century:

"The abstract ideal of brotherhood or companionship must become something real. How can companionship become real? By associating, by truly uniting with the other person, by no longer fighting people with different interests but instead COMBINING those different interests.

"Associations are the living embodiment of companionship. The life-spirit [Budhi] must be alive in the sphere of rights, and with the Christ Spirit brought into economic life, spirit-man will come to life in its first beginnings through associations. The earth, however, yields none of this. Human beings will only come to this if they let the Christ, who is now approaching the ether, enter their hearts and minds and souls."

-Rudolf Steiner, Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind

Some will remember that Dr. Steiner said that Robinson Crusoe was an Ahrimanically inspired- man sufficient unto himself, like what is described in the works of Ayn Rand.

The threefold social concept reflects the processes of metabolism, brain/sense and rhythmic, also the relationship of these three processes to the higher man - Manas, Budhi and Atman.


The Budhi quality is one of loving compassion and self sacrifice. It maybe possible to have a rights sphere without this quality, but this is something that was never taught by Dr. Steiner.

Rudolf Steiner on Christian Social Life:

"A social community in the name of Christ will however be possible, providing we do not insist on a political state, but rather establish an independent life of the spirit. This can be Christian through and through. And this independent life of the spirit will be able to illumine the sphere of life where we have government and states, a sphere that simply cannot be Christian.

"The result will be that an economic life based on associations can develop, though this, too, cannot be Christian in itself. The people who are involved in it will be Christian, however. They will be filled with the Christ-impulse. What we must do is to let people enter into an independent life of the spirit. Then it will be possible to make the whole of social life Christian."

-Rudolf Steiner, Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind, November 1920

  The disease in society today is lack of spiritual life:

"People's thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: that, in a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideological role, common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. What ails the body social today is impotence of spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged there will then be a basis on which to develop the kind of thinking needed for the social movement."

-Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal