Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Rudolf Steiner gives a penetrating description - from his spiritual research into the evolution and history of the human being, earth and cosmos - of the experiences people gained through the ancient mysteries. With an Introduction by Dr A. Welburn

Leseprobe

RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

The ‘winged Victory’ from the sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace: symbol of the triumph in the inner struggle of initiation.

MYSTERY KNOWLEDGE AND MYSTERY CENTRES

RUDOLF STEINER

Fourteen lectures given in Dornach between 23 November and 23 December 1923

Edited with an introduction by Dr Andrew Welburn

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Translation revised by Pauline Wehrle

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House The Square Forest Row RH18 5ES

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

Originally published in German under the title Mysteriengestaltungen (volume 232 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized translation published by kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

Translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 1997

The moral right of the translator has been asserted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 317 2

Cover: art by Anne Stockton; design by Andrew Morgan Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Introduction: Rudolf Steiner and the Renewal of the Mysteriesby Andrew Welburn

Lecture 1The Life of the Human Soul 23 November 1923

Lecture 2The Working of the Soul on the Human Body 24 November 1923

Lecture 3The Path into the Inner Core of Nature through Thinking and the Will 25 November 1923

Lecture 4The Relation of Human Beings to the Earth 30 November 1923

Lecture 5The Mineral, Vegetable and Animal Creations 1 December 1923

Lecture 6The Mysteries of Ephesian Artemis 2 December 1923

Lecture 7The Mystery Centres of Hibernia 7 December 1923

Lecture 8The Nature of the Hibernian Mysteries 8 December 1923

Lecture 9The Great Mysteries of Hibernia 9 December 1923

Lecture 10The Chthonic and the Eleusinian Mysteries 14 December 1923

Lecture 11The Secret of Plants, Metals and Human Beings 15 December 1923

Lecture 12The Mysteries of the Samothracian Kabeiroi 21 December 1923

Lecture 13The Transition from the Spirit of the Ancient Mysteries to the Medieval Mysteries 22 December 1923

Lecture 14The Striving of the Human Soul during the Middle Ages 23 December 1923

Appendix 1 Original German Texts of Verses

Appendix 2 The Mystery of Transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Notes

Publisher’s Note

INTRODUCTION

Rudolf Steiner and the Renewal of the Mysteries

by Andrew Welburn

The cycle of lectures included in this book was in some ways the pinnacle of Rudolf Steiner’s work as a spiritual teacher. Yet it is as well to realise as we read them that the lectures were held at the site of his recently destroyed masterpiece of sculptural architecture, the Goetheanum, which had been built as the spiritual home of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, near Basel in Switzerland. On that same site would rise Steiner’s new or Second Goetheanum building in ‘eloquent concrete’, with its powerful sculptural forms conceived afresh in the more modern medium yet retaining something of the spirit of the old. Already he had been considering the stylistic and spiritual requirements of the future construction, and early the next year, in 1924, produced the first plasticine models from which the design began. In the meantime, at the Christmas Foundation meeting of 1923, he had founded the Anthroposophical Society anew, preparing the members for its different inner reality and its different formal organization in the parallel series of meetings and lectures to which he occasionally refers directly in these.1

In inner content the course of lectures, the future building and the refounded Society are all alike the expression of a profound single vision—a renewed presence of the Mysteries in the modern world.

All alike were Rudolf Steiner’s response to a period of endings and beginnings, destruction and spiritual re-creation, the rebirth of the old in new forms, the triumph of the spirit over material change. These lectures on the Mysteries weave together new ideas from themes long familiar to his audiences and from esoteric truths hardly touched on as yet even in Rudolf Steiner’s remarkable opening of esoteric knowledge to the spiritually seeking souls of the twentieth century. They help to show that by placing himself at the head of the Society (in which he had previously held no official title) he intended anything but a return to the old form of a secret society. He was rather pouring out what he knew, embodying it in living forms of community, expressing it poetically, scientifically and historically to make it real and available to all those who needed it.

The Mysteries have been since ancient times an expression of the inner triumphing over external forces. In Antiquity they played the role especially of preserving a link with the ‘time of the gods’, of the primordial revelation. Not in a static way, but by bringing the chosen leaders, prophets or priests to confront the powers of life and death, to discover the deeper needs and potential of the human spirit, the Mysteries had kept humanity in touch with the living foundations of experience. For those who went through their processes, the attainment of wisdom was the culmination of an existential struggle, and the temples of the Mysteries were distinguished from those of the more familiar ‘public’ divinities in the ancient Graeco-Roman world by the single feature of the ‘winged Victory’ which adorned the pinnacle of the edifice. The celebrated Victory (Nike) from the temple of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace is a supreme work of art, and also a quintessential embodiment of the spirit of the Mysteries in which Rudolf Steiner continued to work.2 The theme of the Mysteries had occupied him since writing Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902), one of his earliest anthroposophical books. There he had shown Christianity’s emphasis on the individual, on the intensity of a personal relationship to Christ and on individual salvation to be a further stage or evolution from the Mysteries’ fundamental principle. In losing touch with its Mystery-origins later Christianity seemed to him to be losing its only chance to give meaning to the modern struggle of the individual, which is in fact deeply rooted in Mystery spirituality—little as the secularized world is inclined to acknowledge this.

Ironically, the Churches had abandoned the very element in their spiritual inheritance which should have given them a key role in modern culture. Rudolf Steiner showed the way in which the content of Christianity could be rediscovered out of the Mystery-struggle in contemporary form—in the striving and inner victory, the death and resurrection processes of the attainment to spiritual knowledge. That did not mean that it should not then be shared by a Church, a community, shaped by common needs and a common history. The ideal of universal communion was one of the new developments where Christianity had evolved beyond the older Mysteries, and the inner discovery of Christian truth by the individual would not be a denial of its meaning for the community. Indeed, Steiner’s later thought frequently suggests a subtle and dynamic new model of the mutually fructifying relationships between individual knowledge, the ‘spiritual interaction’ of the Mysteries and the shared values of community. His own threefold vision of society might be expected therefore to help us understand the way he envisaged that in these several spheres a future humanity would again be able to draw upon the resources of spirituality epitomized in the Mysteries. It was grounded in the threefold understanding of human nature, which was central to his mature thinking and is expressed in the ‘Foundation Stone’ Meditation given at the climax of the refounding of the Society.

Human individuality, the ego, has become crucially important; Rudolf Steiner grasped the momentum of twentieth-century history, which is ever and again revealed to be the striving of humanity to base forms of life on the development and fulfilment of free individuality. His early philosophical work is devoted to the deeper implications of this truth. But the individual does not and cannot exist in isolation. The way through the minefield of the twentieth century must therefore lie in understanding the way in which individuals can engage with the other dimensions of society—the spheres of brotherly-and-sisterly working together and of collective values, the sphere where everyone must be considered equal.3 Only by understanding these complementary spheres can we steer our way past the attempts to subordinate the individual to collective goals or the exaltation of competitive individualism at the expense of society, which have alike led to so many human tragedies.

Even though Steiner failed (narrowly) to get a hearing for these principles in the restructuring of Europe after the Great War, they remain a key to the finding of a balance in ourselves which is essential to the cultivation of the spiritual life. Each of these spheres is also within us, in our own deeper human constitution, and each sphere has its spirituality as was understood in ancient times when the teaching of the threefold man and his relationship to the universe was still grasped and applied. When Steiner looks back to the world of antiquity and the early role of the Mysteries, it is accordingly not to turn us back from the Christian evolution of ego-consciousness— but it is to remind us that the spiritual life has always adapted itself to changing circumstances, and that the Mysteries need to assume a form that preserves their harmonizing role.4 The spirituality of each sphere has to change to suit the new, more individualistic emphasis, whose emergence is in turn put into a broader perspective in the evolution of consciousness. The self is not an end itself, but grows through awareness of the deeper history behind modern esotericism, and in particular to understand that special creativity, that self-overcoming of the developed individuality which is called love.

The Three Spheres 1: Oracles, Individuals, Knowledge and Freedom

In an evolutionary sense, therefore, Steiner can look back to former times in order to understand the spiritual potential of the present. If we take ancient Greece, for example, we find that the Mysteries existed there alongside the public cults and also the oracles—three separate institutions, each with a certain parallel to broadly equivalent manifestations today, if we are willing to recognize them. The oldest type of spirituality among them was the oracular. In Atlantean times the oracles had been humanity’s primary way of experiencing the will of the gods.5 The myths, for instance concerning the oracle at Delphi, point to a continuity with those archaic times by relating that after the Flood, Deucalion’s ship was left stranded high and dry there, and that following the oracle’s instructions he populated the earth anew. It is characteristic of an oracle that its knowledge is specific to a time and a place: a person goes to a holy site, and at a sacred time or season consults the god. Such oracles remained widespread in the Mediterranean civilizations, being scattered through Italy, Greece, Asia Minor (Turkey) and the north African coast. The querent receives in answer a priestly response (i.e. a message from the god), a natural sign (such as the rustling of the leaves of Zeus’ sacred oak at Dodona) or a dream-vision that reveals the presence of the god. Usually the response was a prediction. Those who went to consult the Greek oracles asked generally about their health, their own prospects or those of the town or the nation. Thus the oracle answered an individual’s need to know; and once armed with the god’s predictive knowledge, the person went away again to recover, to solve his personal problem or pursue his career, leaving his thank-offering to the god or the sanctuary behind. But consulting an oracle demanded no spiritual preparation (beyond perhaps a basic purification rite), and no further commitment afterwards; it did not put gratified questioners in touch with each other, but rather gave them freely what they needed to get on with their lives.

Much of the approach and to some extent even the vocabulary of the oracles survives in modern times in a surprising domain, perhaps: namely, predictive science. The technical term including in it the root-word theos (god), referred originally to the divine oracle. As the scientific term ‘theory’ it now designates a method whereby an hypothesis is tested by making certain predictions, enabling it to be the basis of experiment. This essential scientific idea is still oracular, not just in its language of ‘theory’ but because it likewise demands that we go out to where the god speaks. Science strongly differentiates itself from the kind of deduction and speculative use of ideas that scientists often claim (rightly or not) to be widespread in other domains, and can only be science if it yields a concept that can be tested in the actual world. Just so the ancient oracles had to be consulted in situ. Moreover, they rarely or never gave general, philosophical ideas in response to a question, but practical (if somewhat riddling) advice related to specific circumstances, a particular illness, the outcome of a particular contest, the best specific time for an undertaking. And in the ideal, modern science is oracular in that it belongs to no closed community; its truth is accessible to all who are prepared to go and ask for it. (In practice, the ideal may be tempered by other factors.) Scientists often erroneously believe that this makes science ‘value free’, a truth outside mere human prejudices and opinions. But even if that is hardly the case, it shows how the notion of scientific truth as the voice of a god to mere human beings is capable of tempting even modern-day adherents into excessive, sometimes even fanatical statements.

There are, of course, obvious changes in the whole structure of society and knowledge when we move to the present-day world. The individual who searches for answers, which no-one may reformulate or pre-empt by asking for faith, is in some sense an oracle to himself. If the Atlanteans were entirely governed by oracles, that meant that in the sphere of individuality and individual initiative they were totally undeveloped. Yet the continuing parallels with modern knowledge show that oracular knowledge has not been left behind in subsequent history, but has rather been internalized and even made the basis of the seeking, enquiring self.

The Three Spheres 2: Religion, Shared Values and Community

At the opposite pole to the oracles, the ancient world celebrated the public cults of the gods, especially, in Greece, the Olympian sky-gods whose quality of light and openness makes them the embodiment of the collective, social aspect of spirituality. They dramatize the shared values of the community, whose life they project on a grand plane, exhibiting its essence in their larger-than-life quarrels and reconciliations, rivalries and amours. And the people took part in their worship through festivals, processions and holidays—collective gestures that helped society feel at one, both with itself and the order of the world. There was, however, scarcely what we would now call a religion. To share in the festivals did not signify any special knowledge or set of beliefs, and no special commitment to the god concerned. Collective feeling was thus loose but widespread, and the many local variations of practice did not make anyone feel excluded. It was in fact the adherence with passionate intensity to one God or Saviour which marked out the early Christians in the Roman Empire, and their refusal to take part in the rites that expressed human solidarity with the social gods of hearth, home, sex and vitality made them seem to some to be ‘atheists’ striking at the roots of society! Only gradually did it become clear that the Christians were organizing a much more powerful social order, a Church that was not a set of overlapping, uncentralized cultic communities with little in the way of strong beliefs to bind them together but a world-wide community united by the demanding conditions of their new faith.

The underlying assumption behind the ancient Greek cults was that everyone everywhere must fundamentally be worshipping the same gods and so share the same values. They evinced little awareness, in other words, of distinctive community. Religious practice was local and unambitious in the sense of wishing to share any particular religious approach more widely. And if there was little awareness of alien values that might challenge theirs, social and religious values at home were therefore basically unquestioned also. Even when, after Alexander’s conquests, the Greeks came into contact with a wide range of beliefs and cultures, they continued to hold on to their fundamental attitudes. The ideal of ‘syncretism’, or identifying one god with another, enabled them to avoid recognition of essential differences and stress the similarities; universally shared values were sought abroad, those who questioned values at home might again meet the fate of Socrates.

The world of the Olympians represented an experience of universal order, reflected on earth. But the myths spoke repeatedly of the gulf dividing gods and men, and of the hubris involved in trying to bridge it; those who attempted to were punished with mind-bending tasks in the underworld, or mocked and tempted to their destruction by ‘the envy of the gods’. I.e. no one could enter the world of gods and stand on their level, determining values, shaping society and belief—at least, not through the framework of the public cults or of the oracles. It was possible, however, for the few, through the medium of the Mysteries—the third great division of Greek spiritual life.

The Three Spheres 3: The Mysteries, Transformation and Collaboration

It was in the Mysteries that human beings did not merely throng around the temples in celebration, but entered into the domain of the sacred, took part in the life of the gods. The initiate became a god (divinization, apotheosis, taking the name of a god such as Osiris, Bacchus, Attis, etc.) or even a creator of gods. The process involved ordeals and intensive preparation. ‘A special mode of life was one of the requirements for a subsequent initiation,’ explains Steiner. ‘The senses were to be brought under the control of the spirit; fasting, isolation, ordeals and certain meditative techniques were employed to that end. The stable realities of ordinary life were to lose all their value, and the whole orientation of perception and feeling to be completely altered.’6 Here then we find that questioning of values, the discovery of the existential value of experience itself, which was lacking or forbidden in the social religions or the oracular sources. Mystery-knowledge was personal and direct, and gave the power where necessary to change things. It was also associated with a certain scepticism and breaking through the inherited boundaries of ideas—not, however, in the nihilistic modern way but as part of the way knowledge originates and is conveyed to society. All the discoveries that enabled human civilization to emerge, such as fire, agriculture, writing etc., were attributed to the founders of the Mysteries who shared the knowledge of the gods. The calendar, which brought society into harmony with the cycle of renewal, was likewise a Mystery-secret that led to the regulation of almost every aspect of life. Above all, the Mysteries brought people to face the enigma of death and to seek meaning in the face of its threatened negation of life. Unlike the timeless Olympians, the Mystery-gods often died and returned to life. Their mythology is violent and unstable, mapping out the upheavals of the soul which their adherents will have to live through if they are to share in their ‘higher knowledge’.

Initiates in the Mysteries were bound together by fraternal bonds. Under vows of secrecy, the knowledge of the Mystery-techniques of divinization was handed down as the foundation of human life. It was only the product, the outer result, that was known to society as a whole. The process of the advancement of knowledge, just like the questioning that was one element in it, was made known only to a very few. In this way the Mysteries had already conveyed divine knowledge to those who could make the inner effort to work with it for thousands of years when Greek civilization arose. In contrast to the surprisingly undeveloped state of individual-searching (i.e. oracular knowledge) and of collective identity (awareness of special values uniting groups of people) even in classical Greece, the Mystery collaboration of brotherly-and-sisterly human effort with divine knowledge was highly advanced. The Mysteries were a potent force reaching into every domain as they had already been in the great theocratic cultures of Egypt, Babylon and the East. If anything they were beginning to wane in their influence—although, as Rudolf Steiner demonstrated, philosophy remained dependent upon the Mysteries right through the classical period. And the content of religion, furnishing the values which the ordinary people could not question, continued to originate from the Mysteries down to the time of Christianity when the initiates understood the reality behind the events that, to outsiders, remained enigmatic and obscure—the death and resurrection of a god, but happening now as a fact of history. For those who could see, the Mysteries were then finally revealed to the world. The light shone in the darkness, but the darkness scarcely comprehended it.

It would be a mistake to suppose, on the other hand, that Christianity was simply the Mysteries transferred to outer event. Within the Mysteries, in the secrecy of the temple, had occurred a transformation that showed the actual creative presence of the gods. To revisit the foundations of life, however, to enter directly into the moral and spiritual basis of things and to overcome death was something that happened in the Mysteries in separateness, apart from the conditions of ordinary life. In isolation, the initiate could then give himself up to the gods, dissolve his identity and be remade. He would return to the mundane world with a deeper, direct assurance of the reality behind it. This was not merely knowledge, but gnosis, a transforming, liberating recognition of the spirit. Aristotle points out that the initiates in the Mysteries were not so much taught as ‘moulded’. Their experience could not be put in the form of ideas, but only recognized by the other initiates who had themselves been through the process. This in itself cannot directly become the power than can appear in external reality and redeem it. The central Mystery-divinity is not so much the Christ as a goddess of wisdom who gives birth to a Christ—but a Christ as little child, not yet grown up in the cosmos, not yet ready to step out into the world.7 In Egypt it was Isis who revived Osiris and gave birth to his mystical successor, Horus the sun-child; in Greece it is Persephone who dies and returns to life at Eleusis, and bears the divine child Iacchos. The Mysteries are dominated by the great goddesses, who are all versions of divine wisdom, Sophia. In mystical tradition and in the Gospel of John, this divine Sophia is the true Mother of Christ. Mystery-conceptions such as that of the divine Logos (‘Word of God’) link Christianity with the cult of Ephesian Artemis. The Word can sound for the initiate who makes the human soul an image of the goddess Wisdom in one of her several forms; in human life as in the cosmos she will then give birth to the Christ-child deep within us.

But the Mystery-wisdom needs to join together with something quite different in nature if the Christ is to become the uniter of souls throughout the world, to live in the world and to save it. For the Christ to become incarnate and live in humanity, humanity had itself to evolve to the stage of carrying the mystically apprehended divinity within into collective life. The evolution of greater individuality and ego-consciousness is one side of this development. The ancient world had resisted such individualization, except in the controlled sphere of the Mysteries, because it implied on the one hand the increasing fragmentation of society which is in truth all too familiar to us today. On the other hand, it could be taken further in the life of humanity at large if at the same time the uniting power of the Mystery-experience could also go beyond the bounds of the small brotherhoods of mystai and bring together the people of the world—as individuals, in freedom, yet united on a deeper level. The life and death of Christ, in Rudolf Steiner’s profound interpretation, was the means whereby the divine Mystery which joined the initiates in the Mysteries flowed over into the sphere of universality and was given to mankind. The Christ who in the Mystery-sphere remains a divine child, and where spiritual death and resurrection was a transcendent experience for the few, in their highest initiation, entered into history. ‘In the Mystery places the spirit had been poured out upon the mystai of old. Through the “Mystery of Golgotha” it was poured out upon the whole Christian community.’8

In Paul’s letters and other passages of the New Testament the Christian communities are referred to as ‘the saints’, but the word thus rendered really means simply ‘holy (people)’. In sharp contrast to later usage, it carries no connotation of ‘an outstandingly holy man’, raised above the ordinary believers. That was a rather retrograde notion, brought in later when the court of Byzantium adopted Christianity. In the elaborate hierarchy of the courtiers, one needed to oil many wheels, to have friends who would talk to friends, or finally personal intercessors with God’s ‘vicar’ (substitute) the Emperor. An alternative route was to go via the influential Emperor’s mother. Similar routes to obtaining a hearing with God were assumed to exist through ranks of the saints or the Mother of God. But originally the Christians were a holy people as such. Their worship was a ‘calling out’ of the people (ekklesia): the term normally rendered ‘Church’ basically means the actual assembly or congregation. Gatherings were in some sense like the old festivals, or communal gestures—but with a tremendous difference. For the Christian communities were aware of the need to preach their Gospel, to establish their spiritual values in the face of an alien world. And they felt united in their ‘holiness’, which was yet a holiness that could be conferred upon anyone who joined them, anyone who wished to share in the destiny of the people of Christ. There had been nothing like this in the ancient festivals and local cults, nor in the Mysteries, whose centres could rarely hold more than a dozen adherents. The widespread communities’ amazing sense of solidarity the world over through the Christ who still lived in them did incontrovertibly change the world, making them a force in society that was not based on inheritance, origin or special gifts but on a collaboration of many different people sharing deeply held values and believing in their destiny.

There had been something resembling this in Antiquity only among the Jewish people. Shaken out of the static assumptions of the great sedentary civilizations of the Near East by the repeated disasters of their history, the Jews evolved the first stages of that individual identity, defined by the complexities of changing life-experience, which we have inherited today. It was still a group-identity, comprising all those who had lived through the problems and uncertainties, the vicissitudes of the history of the ‘chosen people’. Christian universality, however, would be unthinkable had it not had as a prototype this previous model. Yet the step from a sense of belonging because one has been born into a community and shares its problems and joys to that of sharing in one which comes together by the decision of separate individuals across the world, which is joined essentially only by love of Christ and all those in whom He lives, was still an enormous one. It required that extraordinary new outpouring of the Mystery-spirit upon the world, the death and resurrection of a god upon earth. The Father of Christ was certainly the Jewish God of history who had spoken through the prophets. But Christianity can only be understood in its full meaning when we grasp its esoteric role as at the same time the fulfilment of the Mysteries.

The New Mysteries and the Three Spheres

When he restored this understanding to the modern world, then, it could clearly not have been Rudolf Steiner’s intention to reverse history. It is the role of the Mysteries to provide the substance that passes over into the received religions of the peoples. They furnished the myths of the ancient world, in which the ordinary people believed; when humanity’s evolution required it, they took the form of an earthly Event so that Christ’s presence could unite mankind. The boundary between the brotherhood-Mystery sphere and the equality-universal sphere is not a matter of closure but of transformation. And likewise, in the modern age, the individual must live in both these spheres. But we must learn how to accommodate ourselves to the nature of the sphere in which we work. In the past, it is true, this did in practice limit the interaction of the domains so that they were separate, and people were more restricted in their ability to move between them. But nowadays we are more able to move between the different domains, combining their resources in freedom. The renewal of the Mysteries which Steiner projects in this book is a continuation of the role the Mysteries always had, deepened and extended by the Christian evolution. The universal working of Christ in humanity did not mean the end of the Mysteries, but a new beginning: ‘There was still a place for initiation. For whereas faith allows a person to participate unconsciously in the content of the Mystery of Golgotha, initiation leads to a fully conscious connection with the power that streams invisibly from the events depicted in the New Testament, and which ever since then has pervaded spiritually the life of humanity.’9 He recognized in the widest possible way the working of the Christ, wherever community comes into being from the hearts of free individuals, whether or not they cry ‘Lord, Lord’.10 The esoteric Christianity of the new Mysteries neither wishes to replace the existing Christian Churches and movements, nor to infiltrate them, but to address them in freedom from a sister sphere—one where the truths of religion are tested by individuals, and where the substance of individuals is transformed through working together out of the spirit.

It could be no part of the role of the new Mysteries to found a Church. But when a group of Church-orientated theological students asked for spiritual content to bring about a ‘religious renewal’ in that sphere, Rudolf Steiner naturally saw in this a creative step in the relation between different yet mutually interacting spheres. The Christian Community movement which resulted represents a Church open to the renewed content of the Mysteries, and with its sacraments shaped by the spirituality of the modern Christ-experience it continues to work for the desperately needed enriching of Church life. But what was wrong with the mainstream of the Church, it is worth stressing, was not that it was a Church but that it had over many centuries come to forget (or suppress) that original impulse from the Mysteries to which it owed its existence. As a result its spiritual essence had lost its inner connection with life, being presented as an authoritative revelation from the ‘beyond’, requiring submission and blind acceptance. In many ways, traditional churchly Christianity is now paying the penalty for its dogmatic removal of spiritual truth from human knowledge and life—a rift which Rudolf Steiner certainly wanted to heal, not to widen further.11

The reassertion of the place of the Mysteries in spiritual life was central to his purpose in restoring the balance of human existence. Torn between alienated, uncertain consciousness or submission to religious ‘authority’, modern humanity cannot unfold freedom—and, perhaps still more importantly, cannot use that freedom to work together out of spiritual insight. That was essential to Steiner’s conception of an anthroposophy that would flow out into education, medicine, agriculture, painting and the arts, into humanizing the way we work in businesses or in banks—all that makes his spiritual approach a power to bring about creative change in the world about us.12 In earlier stages he had tried to connect with the vestiges of the older Mystery-forms, which in the fraternal sphere of society had continued a shadowy sort of existence right through the Middle Ages in the trade guilds and professional associations. Indeed, the professions were still known, right up to the seventeenth century, as ‘Mysteries’. (It is something of a joke in Shakespeare when even the common hangman proudly refers to his ‘Mystery’.) If we remember this use of the term today it is usually in relation to the ‘mystery plays’ of medieval England or Germany, so called because each was mounted by one of the ‘Mysteries’, i.e. professional guilds. But these organizations had also remained the repositories of oral tradition, handing down the practical skills of architecture, for example, with the mathematical knowledge needed to build the cathedrals and to bring together the different elements from carpentry to stained-glass making required for their completion. The ‘Mysteries’ handed down their knowledge under oaths of secrecy, and it was far from being just mechanical knowledge. Work has become mechanical, dehumanized, in fact, precisely as the Mysteries died away. Their content was on the one hand the knowledge which brought people practically together to achieve a joint work, and on the other it was the spiritual conviction, the deeper meaning behind work which inspired it and gave it inner depths.

The guild Mysteries were still recognizably the working-on of the Mysteries of old. They gave people the spiritual knowledge they needed for their day-to-day lives (unlike the crisis, special knowledge from the oracles), and that meant to a large extent their very identities. In the ancient Mysteries, says Steiner, the candidate ‘no longer considered himself a human being at all, but said: “I must first become a human being.”‘13 It has always been through the Mysteries that people acquired the role which gives them human value, the spiritual basis of their contribution to existence. Nowadays, people experience alienation from their work, feeling imprisoned or degraded by the labour they have to perform, or are unable to identify inwardly with the demands made upon them by society, precisely because we have lost that deeper dimension to the pattern of life which the Mysteries provided. Modern initiation, for Steiner, has as its purpose the restoration of this human and spiritual value to life. The Mysteries are the key to working together out of the spirit, in no way a turning-in and away from society.

By the eighteenth century, however, the old Mystery knowledge was clearly disappearing. The changes which have fashioned modern secular society also helped to sweep it away. One exception was the craft-knowledge of Masonry, which had adapted to the needs of the time by cutting its ties with building to become ‘speculative’ or ‘free’ Masonry. The greater complexity of social life meant that the knowledge people required was more philosophical, less bound up with specific activity. And from its esoteric core Masonry reached out to continue the ideal of fraternity and the temple, the Mystery-domain. Historians have sometimes been perplexed that Freemasonry was not a revolutionary-democratic movement. It was rather a working in the sphere of fraternity, where people met ‘on the level’ as partners in the spiritual interaction that should shape society. Its esoteric core is clearly linked, as Rudolf Steiner shows, to the Rosicrucian Mysteries, which had also descended from the Middle Ages but had played an active part in the redirection of spiritual life that had become necessary with the rise of the other great force that would alter human values and life-experience—modern science. The Rosicrucian Mystery-teaching was in this respect a direct precursor of the spiritual-scientific form that Rudolf Steiner was able to give to his anthroposophy, and in the final lectures below, in this book, he follows the trajectory that leads through the Rosicrucianism of the Middle Ages to modern forms of spiritual cognition. But he found that the organizations which remained from past stages of spiritual evolution had largely atrophied, or fallen into the hands of men no longer able or worthy to lead them. He turned instead to the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society, and poured into it the wisdom of his life’s experience as an esoteric gift. Freemasonry and related organizations survive today, of course, though their relevance to modern life is not always clear and their emphasis on secrecy and segregation is a dubious persistence from bygone days.14