Michael, the Archangel of Autumn by Rudolf Steiner
Today, generally speaking, people feel they can enter into the life of nature only in the season of growth—of germination and budding, flowering and fruiting. Even if they cannot fully experience all this, they have more sympathy and perception for it than they have for the autumn season of fading and dying away. But in truth we earn the right to enter into the season of spring growth only if we can enter also into the time when summer wanes and autumn draws on; the season of sinking down and dying that comes with winter.
And if during high summer we rise inwardly, in a cosmic waking-sleep, with the elemental beings to the region where planetary activity in the outer world can be inwardly experienced, then we ought equally to sink ourselves down under the frost and snow-mantle of winter, so that we enter into the secrets of the womb of the earth during mid-winter; and we ought to participate in the fading and dying-off of nature when autumn begins.
When the events of autumn and winter draw on, when Michaelmas comes, we certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying; but we must not, as we do in summer, give our self over to a nature-consciousness. On the contrary, we must then devote our self to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, we must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness. We must learn to keep the Michael Festival by making it a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness.
And then the form of Michael stands before us again. If, under the impulse of Anthroposophy, one enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakes in themself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before them, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near.
This will come about if humans can experience not only an inward spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a forcible Imagination, summoning us to inner activity.
And when in high summer, from a particular constellation, meteors fall in great showers of cosmic iron, then this cosmic iron, which carries an enormously powerful healing force, is the weapon which the gods bring to bear against Ahriman, as Dragon-like he tries to coil round the shining forms of humans. The force which falls on the earth in the meteoric iron is indeed a cosmic force whereby the higher gods endeavor to gain a victory over the Ahrimanic powers, when autumn comes on. And this majestic display in cosmic space, when the August meteor showers stream down into the human shining in the astral light, has its counterpart—so gentle and apparently so small—in a change that occurs in the human blood.
This human blood, which is in truth not such a material thing as present-day science imagines but is permeated throughout by impulses from soul and spirit, is rayed through by the force which is carried as iron into the blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear and hate. This permeation of human blood by the anxiety-dispelling force of iron is a meteoric activity. The effect of the raying in of the iron is to drive fear and anxiety out of the blood.
And so, as the gods with their meteors wage war on the spirit who would like to radiate fear over all the earth through his coiling serpent-form, and while they cause iron to stream radiantly into this fear-tainted atmosphere, which reaches its peak when autumn approaches or when summer wanes—so the same process occurs inwardly in man, when his blood is permeated with iron. We can understand these things only if we understand their inner spiritual significance on the one hand, and if on the other we recognize how the sulfur-process and the iron-process in man are connected with corresponding events in the cosmos.
Just as at Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Redeemer, and at Easter the death and resurrection of the Redeemer, and as at St. John's Tide we celebrate the outpouring of human souls into cosmic space, so at Michaelmas—if the Michael Festival is to be rightly understood—we must celebrate that which lives spiritually in the sulphurizing and meteorizing process in man, and should stand before human consciousness in its whole soul-spiritual significance, especially at Michaelmas. The Festival of strong will—that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. If that is done, if nature-knowledge is true spiritual human self-consciousness, then the Michael Festival will shine out in its true colors.
