The “Calendar of the Soul”
UPDATE: The 2024-2025 guide has been added below…
In 1912 Rudolf Steiner provided a “calendar of the soul,” 
weekly verses that express how the changing seasons in the natural world and in our own inner lives are helping our consciousness evolve.
[Herbert O. Hagens has prepared dates for the Calendar
for 2022-2023, 2023-2024, and 2024-2025.]
In an article first published in Orion magazine in Autumn 1999, “The One Life Within Us and Abroad,” Prof. Gertrude Reif Hughes describes Steiner’s Calendar as a personal awakening. “That year I became able to “read” the Soul Calendar as Steiner designed it to be read—meditatively.
The Calendar began to offer its gifts to me, and for the next seven years I worked with it almost daily. I saw that the verses are more like koans than poems. The descriptions not only represented processes around me but awakened me to processes occurring within my soul. Earlier I hadn’t felt that echoing, which is fundamental to the Calendar. Now I began to confirm it in my own experience.
You can read Prof. Hughes’ full article, reprinted in the Fall 2012 issue of being human, as part of a special centennial section on the Calendar linked here.
The Calendar of the Soul Online
There are several editions of the Calendar of the Soul on the internet. The one at the Lili Kolisko Institute allows you to click through to Steiner’s eurythmy for that week’s verse. This version offers many translations with original text, and other special features. (If initially you see only the German, hover your mouse pointer over the text to see options.)
I heard there are mp3 files available in which the German Calendar of the Soul is read. However I haven’t found the right website. Perhaps you can help me.
Kelly, hi —
I haven’t been able to locate those.
Does anyone else know?
John Beck
I would like to find Calendar of the soul in German audio as well!! Please let us know. Nicolette111@icloud.com (Vancouver Island). Thank you!
Nicolette, hi – I don’t know of a German audio of the Calendar, but perhaps someone else can direct us?
UPDATE: Here is a link to a YouTube channel where the individual weeks are spoken in German:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvj5A9SG22fr1SZ3CDvV-tQ
German verses
https://calendarofthesoul.net/
My dear friends,
I purchased these 52 mp3 files from Kilian Voß (Voss) about three years ago. He currently is moving from Germany to England. You may reach him on Facebook.
Ken Simpson
Thanks, Ken!
Is it possible to have the weekly Calendar of the Soul verses emailed? I would love that, and I am also enquiring on behalf of a friend who originally had the idea.
Judy, hi — this is actually available through the Rudolf Steiner Archive. The link is on this page:
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Articles/GA040/English/AP1982/GA040_index.html
Thanks for asking!
I’m translating the Soul Calendar for eventual publication. It aims to be a free, poetic translation.
This is it for the Ascension verse, 6.
Arisen from my own persona
my real self appears
as revelation of the spheres
that in the powers of time and space
the world is showing me as paradigm
that is divine and everywhere portrays
the image in whose mirror I come true.
and this is a quote fro Rudolf Steiner for this week:
“To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being;
to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.”
Hello Judy,
If you are still looking for a way to receive the Calendar verses every week by email–On Sundays– you can send me your email and I will send you what I have been emailing to friends for the last several years. I include Steiner’s original, four translations, paintings and pictures and commentary to help penetrate the soul meanings in the verses as we develop our Consciousness Soul through the year with Christ and Nature via the 52 verses.
I am happy to add anyone to my email list who would like the weekly emails. ekrivosheia@dslextreme.com Eloise
They are also printed on our Los Angeles website for the year. anthroposophyla.org
Good morning Eloise. I would very much appreciate receiving your weekly emails. Thanks yo u or the offer. Although the concepts are familiar to me, I have just discovered these resources that support my personal beliefs and journey,
Hello Eloise
I would be delighted if you could email me the above ?
Carmelwalker@mac.com
I’m sending my Soul Calendar translations to the wonderful Anthroposophical blog, Reverse Ritual, and they are published there every Sunday. Its worth subscribing to Reverse Ritual, but if you don’t want to do that I could send my translations directly to you every weekend.
Emailing of verses stopped August 2020 from RSA. Only available online. Would be great to have someone or the society to pick up the emailing service again.
Sorry that information was out of date! This is not a commitment we could undertake at the moment. Anyone else?
Just purchased weekly meditations Calender of the soul. Can you tell me what week we are in, 7/9/21
Thank you
Theresa, hi — we have a page for the Calendar of the Soul, where you can view/download a guide by Herbert Hagens to using it in 2021-22. I hope that is helpful!
Is there an article or a book that includes a discussion of the verses in the Calendar of the Soul ? Or does that not exist and individuals need to meditate and discern the verses themselves?
Kathleen, hi – I’ll send you directly to Luigi Morelli’s page millenniumculmination.net/ where you have options to purchase his book or ebook or download a PDF for free, and get other resources. It is not a verse by verse commentary, but I think it will be very helpful. We had a note about this book in the last being human print edition: Exploring Themes in the Calendar of the Soul, by Luigi Morelli, 200 pp. (iUniverse, 2021) “This work explores themes as they emerge in Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, first as they appear during the two halves of the year, spring/summer and fall/winter, secondly in relation to the mid-season quadrants, formed by the verses of so-called cross 7, which divide the year in four equal parts, centered around the times of the equinoxes and solstices. One of the main threads continues the exploration of the polarity thinking / intuition as it emerges from the work of Karl König, and places it in relation to other ones that emerge throughout the year, such as the expressions of feeling, memory, will, cosmic thinking and cosmic Word and their relationship to the human being. During spring and summer we follow the ascent of cosmic life, cosmic light and cosmic warmth, and cosmic Word as gifts bestowed upon the human being by the cosmos. During the cold time of the year these are inwardly elaborated by the human being, conscious of her place in Earth evolution and of her relationship to the Christ impulse, and given back to the cosmos. The Calendar thus exemplifies how the human being is both connected to the movements of the seasons, but also partly independent in having to exert inner initiative that counters natural tendencies.”
ALSO, in the issue before that was the following book note: The Anthroposophical Soul Calendar & the Incarnation Cycle of Man, by Roland Schrapp, 270 pp. (Books on Demand, 2020) “This book takes a completely new look at the Anthroposophical Soul Calendar. It is about the deeper meaning of the fifty-two weekly verses, which has remained essentially unexplored in the last hundred years since the first edition by Rudolf Steiner. A dense veil of Isis was spread over them, of which is well known that no mortal person can lift it. Only the immortal, psycho-spiritual human being, who knows himself at home in the extrasensory, higher worlds, is capable of doing this. Only to him the weekly verses reveal themselves as a travel guide through these worlds and lift him up to ever higher spiritual-cosmic realms until he reaches the experience of God, from where he gradually descends again into a new life on Earth, enriched in spirit and fertilized in his soul. If the reader embarks on this journey, the spiritual archetype of the Soul Calendar is ultimately unveiled to him and he achieves an extended understanding of Man and Christ. By many quotations from Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and books, the author virtually lets Steiner himself elucidate the breathtaking depths of his mysterious weekly verses.”
While the “blurb” for this second book is quite portentous, Dr. Branko Furst recommended it to us specially.
For a verse-by-verse book perhaps someone else can suggest something?
[…] were introduced.The Calendar of the Soul.We are happy as in years past to be able to offer suggested dates from Herbert Hagens for the use of this amazing resource created by Rudolf Steiner in 1912. There is a brand-new book […]
Please be aware of the calendar app – it supports multiple languages and multiple translations per language
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=il.org.rimon_edu.calendarofthesoul
I am in Central America and there really is no winter. How does this relate to the weeks of the Calendar of the Soul?
Alecia, hi — yes, this is a challenge. The calendar is timed for the northern hemisphere and the natural phenomena relate to the temperate regions. If you have any sign of the seasons where you live, perhaps you can imagine them much more pronounced. Or you can do what Rudolf Steiner might have hoped for and record your own feelings week by week as you respond to whatever changes take place around you!
[…] hemisphere, and all of outer nature is falling to sleep, but in the words of Rudolf Steiner, now is the season when the inmost soul of the human being must stay […]
Greetings! I am seeking to understand the method by which the dates are shifted when the weeks and the verses do not line up as politely as they do for 2024 (when week 52 happens to fall the week prior to Easter.)
For instance, moving from Easter 2024 on into the following year, I arrive at week 52 a full three weeks before Easter 2025. I imagine that there will be a few spans during which a given verse therefore stretches across two or more weeks in order to keep the specific festival verses in their correct orientation. In other years I believe I have seen one or more verses skipped, to counterbalance the opposite circumstance in which the verses outnumber the weeks.
Is there a standard methodology to help mitigate these variations between the verse numbers and the “actual” weeks in a given year?
I appreciate any insight you may offer!
Hello Neelima, This is a terrific question, and points to the whole intent of the Calendar, which is to support an engagement with the changing nature of the year, from one year to the next. Herbert Hagens does a wonderful job each year of aligning the verses to the weeks, whether they need to be stretched or condensed ~ and his list is published both here on the website and in the magazine “Being Human.” Living with the question is good, to see if it’s possible to discern the mood in nature and in the self as the weeks unfold. Truly reading the book of Nature and so, finding the self.