Uriel the Archangel of Summer
In the Northern Hemisphere, the Summer Solstice Festival is the time of the yearly seasonal cycle when will forces are rising within human beings, plants dance toward the sun, and all of nature is energized by Mother Earth’s outpouring of Universal Life Force energy.
Archangel Uriel, who presides over the summer season, is the Master of Universal Life Force Energy, which originates as Subtle Fire in the Divine Mind, and descends through the subtle energy realms until it penetrates material reality; infusing the physical plane with the loving wisdom that is the Living Light, the Holy Spirit. This Subtle Fire is the Source behind the Source of life that burns at the core of Mother Earth, the secret of kundalini energy. This Subtle Fire emanates from the Spiritual Sun and ignites the magnificence of the physical Star we know as Sol.
Uriel presides over the marriage of Energetic Forms found on the causal plane of existence, with the appropriate flavor and measure of Universal Life Force energy necessary to provide a pattern for the birth, growth and complete development of minerals, plants, animals, planets and stars. This energized growth template, or morphogenetic field, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls it, surrounds the space in the material world where the physical being manifests, and this energetic template triggers the birth and guides the growth of stars, worlds, plants, minerals, insects, animals and humans alike from the beginning of their life cycle until the end.
"And long ago at this time of midsummer, people could perceive the mineral realm - at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness - whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. To bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals — those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival — the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song.
Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What people had in their dream-consciousness they poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance."
"Modern humans can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of people who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit."
"But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern humans. They would have said, for example: 'Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.' But in certain ancient times they would have said: 'One can learn these things also today without having any tradition if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice' — and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: 'It is learned from the songbirds.' — For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing.
"My dear friends," Steiner continued, "humankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that people have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe.”
"Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a person, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: 'I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.' Indeed, my dear friends, the human of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing.
He would never say: 'The song that issues from my throat is my reward.' And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm — only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it.
"And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe, and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically, for the time during which they do not sing; but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales."
"Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: 'I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.'
Rather, they would have to say: 'I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been sung out to them into the cosmos.'"
"In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space."
"And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again — of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to humans as ego-power," Steiner says in his April 23, 1923 lecture.
