22/09/2026
𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐦𝐧 𝐄𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐱 - 𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟐
"When summer drew to a close and autumn set in, when the leaves withered and the crops ripened—in other words, when the full, exuberant life of summer faded and the trees became bare—one sensed this, because the insights of the mysteries flowed into these very sensations: The divine-spiritual world withdraws once more from the human being. He feels himself being turned back upon himself; he grows, as it were, out of the spiritual and into nature. — Thus, human beings experienced this immersion into autumn as a withdrawal from the spiritual, as an immersion into nature. The leaves of the trees mineralized; the seeds withered and mineralized. Everything, as it were, was drawing toward the annual death of nature.{...]
And to the students of the Mysteries, to whom one wished to impart teachings that might serve as guiding words—just as one told them in midsummer, ‘Receive the light,’ and in autumn, 'Look around you—one said to them in the depths of winter, ‘Beware of evil.’
And it was hoped that through this prudence, through this guarding against evil, people would arrive at a kind of self-knowledge that would then lead them to realize how they had strayed from their moral impulses over the course of the year."
—Rudolf Steiner, The Annual Cycle as the Earth's Breathing Process and the Four Major Festival Seasons, Lecture V, GA 223, 8 April 1923, Dornach. https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA223/English/SOL/19230408p01.html
