The Calendar of the Soul

The Calendar of the Soul: An Inner Journey through the Year

A combined edition of Karl Kӧnig’s The Calendar of the Soul and An Inner Journey Through the Year. Volumes 6 and 7 in the Karl Kӧnig Archive.

Karl Kӧnig meditated intensely on the 52 weekly verses of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul. He often encouraged his colleagues to find inner strength from the verses, and wrote The Calendar of the Soul, which forms part one of this new combined volume, as a guide for them, drawing out the patterns through the course of the year. There are also some lecture notes and additional essays covering the Winter and Christmas Verses, Forgetting and Losing, and more.

Part two comprises 52 naïve, full-color artistic sketches that Kӧnig created in 1940 to accompany each verse during his internment on the Isle of Man. For each weekly verse of the Soul Calendar, there’s a picture which describes an experience of the inner situation.

This book will be a helpful and inspiring guide for anyone who wants to fully understand and experience Steiner’s Calendar.

About the Author

Karl König (1902–1966) was born in Vienna, in Austria-Hungary, the only son of a Jewish shoemaker. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1927, with a special interest in embryology. After graduating, he was invited by Ita Wegman to work in her Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institute, a clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland for people with special needs. He married Mathilde Maasberg in 1929. Dr. König was appointed pediatrician at the Rudolf Steiner-inspired Schloß Pilgrimshain institute in Strzegom, where he worked until 1936, when he returned to Vienna and established a successful medical practice. Owing to Hitler’s invasion of Austria, he was forced to flee Vienna to Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1938. Dr. König was interned briefly at the beginning of World War II, but on his release in 1940 he set up the first Camphill Community for Children in Need of Special Care at Camphill on the outskirts of Aberdeen. From the mid-1950s, König began more communities, including one in North Yorkshire, the first to care for those beyond school age with special needs. In 1964, König moved to Brachenreuthe near Überlingen on Lake Constance, Germany, where he set up another community, where he died in 1966.