The Raunächte or the twelve Holy Nights between Christmas and Epiphany reflect the twelve signs of the zodiac—twelve inspirations for inner rebirth—as the soul and the cosmos come close together during these holy days and nights.
The leaves on the ground rustle underfoot. The air is clear. The leafless trees tower like sculptures under the open sky. It is quiet and windless, and becomes even quieter when the snow lays its whiteness over the land. Then the crystals swallow every sound. At night, the bright stars gather in the heavens—Orion, Leo, Gemini. Light in the night! Come morning, frost glitters on the branches, refracting the low sunlight as if the stars had fallen to Earth. The cosmos is within reach! A wild year comes to an end, and probably no one is without wounds inflicted or wounds reopened. During these holy days and nights between the years, wounds may heal. The Holy Nights are a time of awakening. The life of nature comes to peace and rest, and so it is with the soul. Peace and rest mean awakening. Nature is awake now—she’s turned inward. That is the gift of wintertime: inner life.
Every season offers an invitation to the soul. Every season celebrates a marriage between heaven and Earth. With our comfortable lives in artificially heated and air-conditioned rooms, we’ve freed ourselves from the cycle of the seasons. We can enjoy fruit all year round, tropical vacations in winter, and skiing weekends in summer. This is good because we must now take the free, self-determined step of resonating with the changing seasons and learning to follow the call of nature anew. Becoming friends with ourselves, trusting ourselves, and becoming a riddle to ourselves—the Raunächte season offers an opportunity for this. The golden foundation of the Holy Nights is silence—the older sister of peace and quiet. Both are the gateway to one’s own soul. Dag Hammarskjöld has a much-quoted saying: “The longest journey is the journey within.” The twelve Holy Nights offer seven-league boots for this journey, providing the readiness and courage for the journey to the Self.
The Magical Moment
When we consider all the changes of recent years and project into the future, it doesn’t take a prophet to paint a picture where hardly a stone is left standing. According to this year’s World Economic Forum report, one-fifth of all jobs will disappear or undergo fundamental changes in the next five years. Inwardly, it’s no different: questions are piling up, and the list is long—what needs to be accomplished, what do others expect, what do we want for ourselves? How does the journey into our Self begin? In a simple, magical moment: we take a deep, conscious breath. We allow ourselves to close our eyes and let a smile play across our face. We send it inward, deep down, to where the Holy Nights resonate and promise a foothold amidst the unrest, solid ground amidst the tumult, an answer amidst the questions, reassurance and companionship amidst the solitude.
This is what our wild time calls for: to become still, to awaken, and to discover that there is a greater, more peaceful life beneath and within this life. The Raunächte become the great intake of breath that spans twelve days and gives depth to the year that follows. To attune to this quiet time, it’s worth remembering an experience of special silence. For me, it was a canoeing trip through Masuria, Poland, when it was so silent that the water dripping off the paddle into the lake seemed too loud. Something of the magic of unending peaceful quietude can now move inward. We discover that peace is not a standing still, but the opposite. In the restful quiet, something stirs, something for which there are many names: confidence, trust, serenity. Rudolf Steiner opens his meditation on quietude:1
Quiet I bear within me.
I bear within myself
The forces that make me stronger.Ich trage Ruhe in mir,
Ich trage in mir selbst die Kräfte,
die mich stärken.
Quiet is within us; it cannot be acquired or desired. When we take a deep breath and pause, it becomes freed and reveals that peace is more than just the absence of noise and stress. It is a force in itself. It is the message of all religions and spiritual paths that in peaceful quietude lies a secret nourishment for the soul, and the Raunächte are its source.
What We Feel, We Can Transform
In the rest of his verse on quietude, Rudolf Steiner calls for us to feel, using our will. Feeling is the field, the writing desk of the soul. What we feel, we can transform. By doing so, we encounter a contradiction: feeling presents us with a dialogue, and at the same time, dialogue is what awakens feeling in the first place. The end, the aim, is also the beginning. What we gain upon the inner path, namely, to be able to feel more deeply, is also necessary from the outset. As soon as we begin to listen and look within, something begins to express itself, stirring our feelings. Feeling is an expression of the soul’s conversation with itself. From this, the third step, the will, becomes possible. These are the three steps: from thinking in peaceful quiet, which ascends to certainty, to the feeling of quiet, through which quiet becomes our “own” quiet, then to a willing in quiet. Our own will gives quiet its strength, allowing us to experience power in powerlessness. Rudolf Steiner’s meditation on quiet continues:
I will fulfill myself
With this strength of warmth.
I will permeate myself
With the power of my will.
And I will feel
How quiet pours
Through all my being,
When I make myself stronger,
When I find quiet
As a force within myself
Through the power of my striving.Ich will mich erfüllen
Mit dieser Kräfte Wärme,
Ich will mich durchdringen
mit meines Willens Macht.
Und fühlen will ich
Wie Ruhe sich ergießt
Durch all mein Sein,
Wenn ich mich stärke,
Die Ruhe als Kraft
In mir zu finden
Durch meines Strebens Macht.
Von der Ruhe zur Stille
From Quiet to Silence
Ocean currents give us a picture of this. On the surface of the oceans—the Gulf Stream from the US to Europe or the Humboldt Current along the coast of South America—water flows as fast as we can walk: 2 to 4.5 miles per hour. But how different it is in the depths! The water of the Gulf Stream sinks to the sea floor east of Iceland. It then travels south in the deep Atlantic Ocean, around South Africa, and rises again off the coast of India. This deep-sea current flows at only a few inches per second, a hundred times slower than at the surface. The seawater in the depths moves at a pace barely faster than the proverbial snail. The water that sinks in Iceland now will return to the surface off the coast of India in 15 years. A flow of infinite quietude!
It’s the same with our soul: on its surface, feelings, emotions, and thoughts create constant movement and changing states. According to a study by Queen’s University in Canada using MRI scans, we change the state of our mind every 10 seconds in everyday life.2 That amounts to 6,000 to 8,000 thought sequences per day. In contrast to these foaming crests of consciousness, a quiet, powerful current flows in our depths with unwavering regularity. When we become quiet and move from this quietude into stillness, we sink into this deep current of the soul. While quiet is the absence of everyday noise, silence is a presence. Silence is always there, covered over by the ups and downs, the hubbub on the surface. Whoever experiences this will likely agree that silence holds a power. It allows us to welcome our weaknesses. It is silence that gives us the force to stay on course in the storms of our time. It is silence that leads to the answer to the sacred question of who we are at our core. In his book on meditation, Arthur Zajonc writes about the “silent self,” the “mystery of our deepest identity.”3 A miracle occurs: we come to ourselves and at the same time enter into a grand conversation, a cosmic conversation. The feeling of loneliness of the ego transforms into a sense of unity. This is the event of meditation, when we take probing steps into a beingness where the separation between ‘I’ and world begins to dissolve.
The Raunächte
What is a path of transformation at Easter is a time of inner birth at Christmas. At Easter, the seven days of the Passion are an ascending path. The twelve Raunächte, as I see it, are less about following a specific order. Like the twelve musical keys or the twelve virtues, what is significant is juxtaposition rather than sequencing. “Here, time becomes space”—the mythical words to the questing Parzival also apply to the Raunächte. So, I don’t relate each day of this sacred time-out to a specific month, as other authors do. Rather, I invite you to turn your attention to a specific question concerning the life of the soul on each day and night during this time. The sequence is characterized by the gestures of the zodiacal signs. Thus, the winged Ram, which soars far above the rest of the zodiac, is associated with “letting go”; the Lion with Regulus the star on its chest, is associated with the transformation of the heart; and the Scales is associated with finding the middle. Like the four members of the human being—from physical to life to soul to spirit—there are four activities for each day of the Raunächte: “wish” for the bodily, “ritual” for life, “observation” for the soul, and “meditation” for the spirit. Guided by the signs of the zodiac, the twelve days and nights of the Christmas season offer twelve opportunities to sanctify this special time with a wish, a ritual, an observation, and a meditation. These four tasks of the soul are complemented by the soul’s three colorings: thinking, feeling, and willing. So that on each of the twelve days and nights of the Holy Nights, the Raunächte, there are seven perspectives, seven invitations. Of course, one need not accept them all.
Wish: With a wish, we build a bridge to destiny. Some fairy tales say that the past was a time “when wishes still came true.” They still do—if they are wishes of the ‘I’ and not of the ego. The wishes that we “deserve” to have fulfilled are the wishes of the ‘I’. Wishes are invitations. We invite ourselves to aim towards the fulfillment of the wish, to sharpen our gaze and our thoughts for its fulfillment. It’s an assignment for our unconscious to direct our receptivity toward the fulfillment of this wish. It’s an invitation to the cosmos, to the spirits who are connected with our lives, and to the deceased, to offer us their support. To make a wish means to have the courage to ask for help. Personal experience shows that it’s worthwhile to set down such a wish in writing. How about a diary in which, in addition to looking back, you also note down your view of the future?
Observation: Through perception, we anchor our soul to the life of nature—its life, its wisdom and serenity, and its slowness become our companions.
Ritual: Through ritual, we connect the force of transformation with life. What we transform becomes symbolically real and manifests the new.
Meditation: Through meditation, we open ourselves to the individual Raunächte in the depths of our spirit. With each meditation, we shift the boundaries of our consciousness, open doors to the deeper forces of life, and come closer to one another both inwardly and outwardly.
It’s worth asking how the quality of each zodiac sign is mirrored in one of the Raunächte as a task, practice, or discovery in thinking, feeling, and willing. Taken as a whole, this opens up an invitation to resurrect seven times a day what is represented by the zodiac sign in the sky. In this way, an inner zodiac is formed in the soul during the Twelve Holy Nights. Ram is described below; for the other nights, you may be inspired by the gestures of the other zodiac signs or the suggestions in my book Die Rauhnächte feiern [Celebrating the Rauhnächte].4
December 24 to 25: The First Night
A man from the West is searching for the meaning of life. He hears there’s a monk in Japan who has something to say on the subject. So he travels halfway around the world and meets the wise man in a secluded hermitage. “Do you know the meaning of life?” he asks the monk. The monk nods. “First we drink tea, then I’ll tell you,” says the wise man and disappears into his kitchen. The traveler, anxious from his long journey, waits impatiently. After a long time, the monk returns with the teapot and asks the questioner to hold out his cup. The monk pours the tea into the cup. When it’s full to the top, he keeps pouring, and the hot tea spills over onto the hands of the guest. “Don’t you see my cup is too full?” he scolds. “Like your mind! When it is empty, I’ll answer your question,” replies the monk. Indeed, a world that is changing so dramatically calls for us to transform ourselves in order to feel at home in it. Every step we take proves this: we lift one foot, balance on one leg for a short time, and then find new ground to place our foot on. Every step is a moment of letting go. As the writer Anke Maggauer-Kirsche writes, you can let go of what you love.5 In this context, “letting go” is the opposite of “getting rid of.” Those who let go remain connected but not bound. With the letting go of the old year, the Holy Nights begin. He who is born this night will later say, “Behold, I make all things new!” (Rev. 21:5) Making room for the new and welcoming it means letting go of the past with love, and that in turn means saying yes to it. It means wandering through the past year once again, in order to bring it to a close and say goodbye.
What were your three most important encounters, experiences, and learning exercises this year? What did you let go of, and what were you able to receive? What was the greatest pain, the greatest happiness? What did you learn about yourself? Everyone may have their own questions that stand at this entranceway to the Holy Nights. What matters is that the stronger we question the preceding year, the richer the answer.
Zodiac Sign: Ram—Letting Go
Ram stands in the night sky for letting go. This image marks the beginning of the zodiac. The small constellation stands far above the zodiac line and thus jumps into view at sunrise. It’s the only zodiac sign that “floats” completely above the sun’s path. A look at cultural history confirms the status of the Ram or the sheep as the first image of the twelve. In 9,000 BC, it was one of the first animals that human beings domesticated. It’s the only herd animal that children can herd. The close relationship between sheep and humans has been handed down in many cultures. In Hebrew, the favorite wife of the patriarch Jacob is “Rachel,” which also means “mother sheep.” The sheep is attributed with polar characteristics. It is the “sacrificial lamb” that patiently takes all suffering upon itself. However, this devotion should not be confused with stupidity, a cliché often associated with sheep. Shepherds from the Alps report that sheep become restless before an avalanche and seek out other grazing grounds when the weather changes. From the beginning of the story of Christmas, where the shepherds with their sheep are the first to learn of the event, to the Apocalypse of John at the “end of days,” sheep appear throughout the New Testament. They form the frame.
This great arc of time is also reflected in the depictions of the Ram. It’s always shown with its head turned toward the past. It stands between past and future and between Earth and heaven. In the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece, the ram can fly and thus saves two children from sacrificial death. The ram’s fleece also belongs to this heavenly side of the Ram. It is golden like the sun and superior to all earthly tools, for nothing can cut it. The sheep is connected to the path of human beings upon the Earth; it makes possible a sedentary life. But the myth also describes how it has its home in heaven. The Ram bridges past and future, Earth and heaven, and is thus the patron of the first Holy Night. The fact that the lamb is the archetype of sacrifice fits with the image we’re painting here, for sacrifice is the highest form of letting go.
Letting Go in Thinking, Feeling, and Willing
In our head. This corresponds to letting go of our perspective: abandoning familiar conceptions and freeing ourselves for a new, fresh outlook. French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls this “intellectual hospitality.” We let go of the old and are open to the new; even more, we can welcome the unknown. Departure into the Unexpected is the wonderful title of a book by Arthur Zajonc.6 One example of letting go in our head: temporarily adopting a political belief that contradicts our own.
In our heart. Such a change in perspective means freeing ourselves from entrenched feelings. As an example, take the Muslim story about Jesus. Jesus was walking past a market; a dead dog lay on the path, and a group of people stood around the carcass. One complained about the stench, another about the ugliness. When it was Jesus’ turn, he said, “The teeth are as white as pearls.”
In our feet. To let go in the will means abandoning habits. Choosing a different route to work, saying goodbye to everyday routines, giving away old clothes and unread books. Let it go!
Good to know. The glial cells, which make up more than two-thirds of our total brain mass, show how much the human brain is designed for “letting go.” Brain researcher Helmut Kettermann studies the “calls for help” from damaged neurons. He shows that glial cells are responsible for the breakdown of connections that are no longer needed in order to make room for new ones to grow. Your brain is designed to let go—it’s waiting for you to do so.
Wish. Wishes are an answer to something missing. Cannot a wish also be the answer to abundance? What do you wish would go away? What do you want to free yourself from? How do you want to lighten your load? Which chains need to be loosened? Where do you wish for new freedom?
Ritual. Take a postcard you’ve held on to, a certificate, a photo, and throw it into the flames. How do you feel when the memory goes up in smoke?
Observation. Pick up an autumn leaf from a branch or the ground and immerse yourself in the beauty of its colors and its withering. These are colors of letting go.
Meditation. Bring into the center of your soul the sentence, “Suffering is pain we hold on to.”7 Say it quietly or silently and feel its meaning. Feel the difference between suffering and pain. Feel where you hold on to pain, perhaps letting yourself feel comfortable there. Wander through the seven words as if they were a landscape. Then listen to the reverberations. Concentration and focus are followed by inner expansiveness. This is the path from the eye to the ear, from inner seeing to inner hearing.
The second Holy Night brings the Bull. This zodiac sign calls for a change of will—in thinking, feeling, and willing—as a wish, ritual, observation, and meditation. And so it continues day after day, night after night, up through the Fishes. They call for us to learn to open ourselves to the new.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images ‹Tugenden› [Virtues], Laura Summer, 2025.
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Mantric Sayings: Meditations 1903–1925, CW 268 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2015).
- Anne Craig, “Discovery of ‘thought worms’ opens window to the mind,” Queen’s Gazette, (July 13, 2020); J. Tseng, J. Poppenk, “Brain meta-state transitions demarcate thoughts across task contexts exposing the mental noise of trait neuroticism,” Nat. Commun. 11, 3480 (2020).
- Arthur Zajonc, Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2009).
- Wolfgang Held, Die Rauhnächte feiern: 12 Schritte zu deinem inneren Sternenhimmel [Celebrating the Holy Nights: 12 steps to your inner starry sky] (Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben, 2025). In the book, suggestions are given for all twelve nights or zodiac signs. You can also create them yourself based on your interpretation of the zodiac signs. This article is an abridged excerpt from the book.
- Anke Maggauer-Kirsche, Franziskanerkalender [Franciscan calendar] 2005, published by the Swiss Capuchins (Olten: Swiss Capuchins, 2004).
- See footnote 3. The German title is Aufbruch ins Unerwartete [Departure into the unexpected] (Stuttgart: Verlag Freies, 2016).
- Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life (New York: Harmony Books, 2005), “Secret #5.”
