ROSICRUCIANISM AND MODERN INITIATION E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'Steiner has been able to clarify the historical reality behind the Rosicrucian story, with all its aura of glamour and fantasy. That effected, he points to the enormity of its vision for the future evolution of ideas…' – Dr Andrew Welburn (from the Introduction)In the immediate aftermath of the 'Mystery-act' of the Christmas Foundation Conference, Rudolf Steiner chose to speak on the subject of 'ROSICRUCIANISM AND MODERN INITIATION, Mystery Centres of the Middle Ages'. Clearly connected to the events that had just taken place in Dornach – in which he not only refounded the Anthroposophical Society but took a formal position within it – Steiner begins by exploring the intellectual life of the Middle Ages and the role that Mystery culture played within it. He throws new light on the foundations of Rosicrucianism, its principles of initiation and its inherent impulse for freedom. Steiner also discusses the secret teachings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the dawn of the age of the Archangel Michael.In the second series of lectures, entitled 'The Easter Festival and the History of the Mysteries' (April 1924), Steiner describes how festivals grew out of the Mysteries themselves. He speaks of Mysteries connected to Spring and Autumn, Adonis and Ephesus, and the significance of Sun and Moon. Throughout the volume he discusses the roles of Alexander the Great and Aristotle in world history and the significance of Aristotle's 'Categories'. Published for the first time as a single volume, the freshly revised text is complemented with an extensive introduction by Dr Andrew Welburn, detailed notes and appendices by Professor Frederick Amrine and an index.

Leseprobe

ROSICRUCIANISM AND MODERN INITIATION

MYSTERY CENTRES OF THE MIDDLE AGES

The Easter Festival and the History of the Mysteries

Ten lectures given in Dornach between 4-13 January and 19-22 April 1924

TRANSLATED BY MARY ADAMS AND FREDERICK AMRINE

EDITED BY FREDERICK AMRINE

INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW WELBURN

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 233a

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

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2020

Originally published in German under the title Mysterienstätten des Mittelalters Rosenkreuzertum und modernes Einweihungsprinzip, Das Osterfest als ein Stück Mysteriengeschichte der Menschheit (volume 233a in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the fifth German edition (1991), edited by Caroline Wispler

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1991

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2020

The Publishers are grateful to the University of Michigan Office of Research for their generous sponsorship of this publication

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 617 3

Cover by Morgan Creative Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Visakhapatnam, India

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note

Introduction, by Andrew Welburn

ROSICRUCIANISM AND MODERN INITIATION MYSTERY CENTRES OF THE MIDDLE AGES

LECTURE 1 4 JANUARY 1924

LECTURE 2 5 JANUARY 1924

LECTURE 3 6 JANUARY 1924

LECTURE 4 11 JANUARY 1924

LECTURE 5 12 JANUARY 1924

LECTURE 6 13 JANUARY 1924

THE EASTER FESTIVAL AND THE HISTORY OF THE MYSTERIES

LECTURE 1 19 APRIL 1924

LECTURE 2 20 APRIL 1924

LECTURE 3 21 APRIL 1924

LECTURE 4 22 APRIL 1924

APPENDICES:

Appendix 1. Representation

Appendix 2. The Hierarchies

Appendix 3. The Etheric and the Astral Bodies

Appendix 4. Cosmic Evolution

Appendix 5. Raymond Lull

Appendix 6. Eurythmy

Appendix 7. Amos Comenius

Appendix 8. Ahriman and Lucifer

Appendix 9. Emil Du Bois-Reymond

Appendix 10. Eliphas Lévi

Appendix 11. Ernst Haeckel

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in The Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The first series of lectures here, presented to members of the Anthro-posophical Society, was given immediately following the Christmas Conference (December 1923–January 1924). The title ‘Rosicrucianism and Modern Initiation, Mystery Centres of the Middle Ages’ was formulated by Marie Steiner for its first publication in German in 1932. The lectures set the tone for the evening lectures delivered simultaneously (published in English as World History and the Mysteries in the Light of Anthroposophy).

The second series of lectures, ‘The Easter Festival and the History of the Mysteries’ was also titled by Marie Steiner for its first publication in 1934.

INTRODUCTION

RUDOLF STEINER AND THE ROSICRUCIANS

TRY to find out about Rosicrucianism and the difficulty, as it soon turns out, is not a lack of ‘information’. Far from it. Books, websites, advertisements, correspondence courses, special degrees and mystic rites unknown to ordinary Freemasons, warning rants against world-conspiracies, dark hints from individuals who intimate that if they would they could, offers of rendezvous with the Illuminati, cautionary tales of mysterious abduction, mind-bending, eighteenth-century novels full of fainting women and darkly handsome heroes, infallible ways of making lots of money with or without alchemy, True Rosicrucians, Black Rosicrucians – nothing is easier than to encounter any or all of these. (Only UFOs once possessed a similar perverse caché, now left a bit lacklustre after some belated smirking admissions about Cold War propaganda.) As for the supposed originator, called Rosenkreutz or Rosycross, he is confidently declared a myth, a joke, a cover for sinister powers (read: Jesuits), an aristocratic Count in disguise or in a new incarnation, a hero in trashy stories or seemingly having escaped from one: perhaps the apogee of insanity is the suggestion made by one internet source that he was the last scion of the ruling family of Germelshausen, which is actually a fictional locale like Brigadoon in the musical comedy. It appears originally in an H.G. Wells-style yarn about an accidental time-traveller almost trapped by the olde-worlde charms of a wench there, once popular as a ‘first read’ in elementary German-courses. Why stop there? Was he perhaps also the Prisoner of Zenda, one wonders – and the Man in the Iron Mask? It may well have been intimated somewhere.

Rudolf Steiner’s own reference to the pervasive charlatanry and dilettantism associated with the subject seems apt but even just a little understated, one might think. In the face of all this preposterousness, can Rudolf Steiner really show us within it a serious nature and real importance to Rosicrucianism? And is it conceivable that anything from that patchwork of moth-eaten material served up by the sources really hides deep significance for our modern world? Strangely, yes, he does, and there is deep significance to be found here. Though his main contribution to understanding it all may seem little appreciated either by sympathizers or opponents of his thought, Steiner has been able to clarify the historical reality behind the Rosicrucian story with all its aura of glamour and fantasy. That effected, he points to the enormity of its vision for the future evolution of ideas in a sphere of the world we often struggle to meet with spiritual-creative thought: the scientific and technological domain which all too often threatens to run out of control, destroying our humanity and perhaps our planet. Seen critically but with an open mind to the spiritual dimension it is an amazing story, with its elements of tragedy but a keynote of profound human possibility that still asks for and rewards our attention.

His contact with Rosicrucianism was also a decisive chapter in Rudolf Steiner’s own development as an ‘esoteric’ thinker. Any careful reading of his work cannot fail to impress us, initially for the depth and authenticity of his own experience, which pervades everything that he wrote and said. But that is not all. We should admire equally his paedagogic effort to render it spiritually comprehensible in terms appropriate to his own time and our own. There is an element of timeless truth in anthroposophy, but it is not only for our self-elevation. He wanted it above all to bring people together in all that range of projects, from education to agriculture, architecture to medical practice, which are his living legacy. How Rosicrucianism played into all this – but that would be to anticipate. We must first take some sightings in Rosicrucian history.

Three Rosicrucian ‘Sightings’

For many people the Rosicrucians are the most celebrated of ‘secret societies’. It is worth taking note, however, that the Rosicrucians entered history in a blaze of publicity, not to say hysteria, panic, recrimination, endorsement by some of the leading minds of the day, denouncement by the Church authorities and many of the secular powers, accusation by other factions in the Church of trespassing on their patch – and a general sense that the world as people knew it was coming to an end (a common tendency of thought at the time).

The ‘Rosicrucian furore’ of the early seventeenth century was an outbreak of paranoia comparable in its effects, and larger in scale, to the announcement by Orson Welles in 1938 on American radio that the Martians had landed and were on the verge of taking over New York. (That fictional dramatization was aided by a coincidental power-blackout which only added to the panic.) The furore around the Rosicrucians was triggered by the publication of two short pamphlets in 1614 and 1615. They were printed in Kassel in north Germany, and told of a ‘brotherhood’ founded by an impoverished but ‘highly illuminated’ German thinker, C.R. or R.C. The first pamphlet was a ‘report’ (fama) written in German about the brotherhood, the second an ‘admission’ (confessio) from the brothers written in Latin, acknowledging their design in coming forward and addressing ‘the learned of Europe’. Their message was in essence that ‘a door was opening in Europe’ and that a kind of knowledge was available to them which surpassed the bounds of all that had previously been thought possible, which they were willing to make available to everyone irrespective of conventional academic or theological qualifications. Their knowledge included medicinal science that could prolong human life, mechanical wonders that could transform the way we live, reformist ideas that would alter the whole structure of society and extend the collaborative nature of knowledge into every practical sphere, and even insights into divinity which would make the entrenched divisions of Protestant and Catholic seem like petty hangovers from the past.

A third and much longer pamphlet appeared in 1616, recounting the symbolic story of the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Basically a short novel, it includes elements of social and religious satire, allusions to the limits of conventional knowledge and its practitioners, the story of the mystically coloured calling of C.R. to attain all this and greater wisdom, described in alchemical terms such as formed the technical language of the advanced science of the day, and his instalment as a sort of guardian of knowledge at the gate, so to speak, of the new age that was dawning.i

Throughout the Middle Ages, Church and State had been linked in a symbiotic union which controlled almost every aspect of life in the West. The Church had taken full advantage of its unique authority to unfold its potential in every sphere. Knowledge was organized on powerful logical principles based on the rediscovered teachings of Aristotle – though Plato also played a part. (It is one of the many scandals of the so-called Enlightenment that it denigrated mediaeval thought as mere chop-logic, and Rudolf Steiner in another of his roles helped rehabilitate Thomas Aquinas as a great thinker.) Naturally however it left room for the truths of Christian faith, while harmonising them with Aristotelian science in a breathtaking synthesis, far-ranging and systematic, of all that had come down from the achievements of classical thought. Heaven and earth were separate yet co-ordinated realities, reaffirming each other through overarching belief in an ordered creation. It must be said, on the other hand, that such knowledge was aimed mainly at integration and clarification, at logical certainty that ended by deducing God – and did little to encourage innovation, discovery or the emergence of new perspectives. It is contemplative knowledge. The kind of knowledge indicated by the Rosicrucian pamphlets, in contrast, is immediately suggestive of modern science and technology, based on intellectual exploration and practical application, and glaringly without the proviso that the Churchmen must be allowed to have the last word. In fact, they would even have to change their habits of mind and put their tedious quarrels behind them.

Small wonder that the very fabric of the world seemed in danger of tearing apart if one took the Rosicrucians seriously (at least from the vantage point of institutional authority and settled certainties). They could only be motivated by an insane spirit of rebellion, rooted in a conspiracy of boundless proportions to overthrow civilisation... So the Rosicrucian furore got going and its terror rippled across Europe. The Fama of 1614 had related that C.R. had tried in vain to reason with the Church authorities – even in intellectually advanced Spain (alluding to the Jesuits?) – but when he was rejected had turned to a circle of supporters and sent them out into the world with his message. They were not to adopt any outward sign or mode of dress to distinguish them, but to bring the benefits especially of healing science to suffering humanity (without charge) and to spread knowledge wherever they could find an open ear. They were to gather periodically in the ‘house Spiritus Sancti’ whose location is not revealed. A house of the Holy Spirit is a way of referring to what we call a hospital, but also recalls Christ’s words to the Samaritan woman (John 4, 21-4): in the new dispensation God need not be worshipped in a special place or Temple, but is approached ‘in spirit and truth’. The image is the exact opposite of the popular travesty, where Rosicru-cians dress in strange robes and hold solemn convocations in secret places before elaborate and sinister altars.

The pamphlets do not in fact describe a ‘secret society’ in the Dan Brown sense at all, and secrecy then was an unremarkable feature of guilds and professions anyway. It was not so much a secret as an ‘invisible society’ – or more strictly, since they are men of learning, an ‘invisible college’. It was this which really spooked the Establishment in early modern Europe. Any unmarked individual who moved amongst the ordinary population might be in possession of the boasted knowledge which could overthrow their world and be actively inseminating it; any place where people gathered together to discuss serious questions ‘in spirit and truth’ might even be that hub of the whole conspiracy from which it fanned out and evaded the radar, otherwise effective in its non-technological way, of social and political controls on what people thought.

The resulting paranoia and conspiracy-theory all depended, naturally, on an assessment that the Rosicrucians were indeed in a position to perform what they claimed. And all the signs were that they could. The pamphlets’ bold address to the ‘learned of Europe’ struck a confident note, and the content of the C.R. story and especially of the Chemical Wedding was full of allusions to the latest developments in contemporary thought. The Fama, for instance, made mention of their ‘co-worker’ Theophrastus Paracelsus, claiming that he had read over one small part of the works they had at their disposal, and taken fire from its doctrines. Paracelsus was a Swiss physician and chemist who had already begun to revolutionize medicine and much else, earning the enmity of pharmaceutical vested interests and the dogmatic limit on ideas they imposed. He had swept away traditional vocabulary, inventing his own. He had abandoned the time-honoured mediaeval approach of ‘balancing the humours’ in the blood as the way to restore health, which involved a great emphasis on blood-letting and ensured that doctors were popularly called ‘leeches’ down to much later times. Instead he invented the strategy of treating illnesses by ‘specifics’ based on the particular nature of the disease – essentially the whole science of modern medicine. His use of chemical remedies was a huge step forward and aroused widespread popular amazement at its results. Yet this was only one page, apparently, from the Rosicrucian master text! Or again: the title-page to the Chemical Wedding incorporates a strange symbolic design, easily recognisable to those who knew it as the monas hieroglyphica of John Dee, the genius mathematician, cosmographer, diviner and inspiring spirit of the Elizabethan court circle around Sir Philip Sidney. It fuses conventional cosmic symbols to encapsulate the essence of Dee’s new intellectual approach, signifying the uniting of heaven and earth – in other words, the undoing of those limitations set on the development of thought by the dual framework of mediaeval philosophy-theology. This symbol was the e=mc2 of its day, and shows that the Rosicrucians were presenting themselves as front-line protagonists in the overthrow of the Establishment compartmental-ization of knowledge. Though not minimizing God, this approach put man much more obviously at the heart of the whole process of discovery and mastery of the world around him – and indeed it is in the circles which thrilled to the Rosicrucian message that we find the term anthroposophia (human-centred wisdom) as a new coinage.ii

The Rosicrucians were very much aware, in fact, that science (as we call it) required not only willingness to accept new facts but an inner transformation of human life. They were proffering to the world not only the benefits of medicine and technological advance, but a realignment of the inner life that enabled the knower to stand as a sort of fulcrum between the manifold forces of the cosmos, and deploy them in freedom. The knower brought to the constellation of events before him a kind of transcendence, liberating the situation and revealing new ways of resolution. And what he or she enacted as a knower was naturally also a model for different human relationships to the old mediaeval hierarchical pattern, with its feudal loyalties. The Rosicrucian emphasis on the need for collaboration to bring about the leap to a higher level of knowledge was also a break with the old scholastic notion that all serious knowledge belonged to monkish individuals poring over their tomes in the privacy of their cell. Knowledge was now to shape lives and relationships, to further the development of working at common goals with the manifold talents available. Closer to our own time, Rudolf Steiner brought these thoughts to bear on the problems of human life. Science, he likewise asserts, is never just a reflex of nature. Rather ‘the soul experiences itself during its active involvement with nature, with the result that this active involvement becomes something other than mere knowledge of nature – that is to say, the self-development which occurs in acquiring this knowledge. Esoteric science attempts to put into action the result of this self-development...’iii What he calls esoteric science or anthroposophy is the inner dimension of our modern way of knowing, manifest in our practical approach to life on the one hand but needing that complementary science of human freedom if its extraordinarily fertile results are to lead to a properly integrated society and creative human relationships. Humanity can grow inwardly through stepping into the age of science – but without inner understanding, the forces that are unleashed may also be catastrophic.

Paracelsus already sought to express the dynamism of knowledge and of the nature that is revealed to the new science, with a concept of the three primary forces (the tria prima) to which he gave names derived from his chemical researches. They stand, however, for fundamental laws or phenomena that shape all reality. One is an expansive, unlimited tendency of release, a breaking out of limits which takes its name from the volatility of sulphur; its opposite is the hardening, contracting and deadening force which is manifested in crystallization, in becoming brittle, which takes its name from salt; the third is a balancing, harmonizing force of coming-to-rest-in-itself, which Paracelsus named from the conglobing tendency of mercury. These concepts were of great significance to Rudolf Steiner, and he was to trace them back to their spiritual origins and to portray the human condition as a struggle, with a special pathos yet also a god-like possibility of creation, between their contending forces. In the carved wooden statue which he produced in collaboration with Edith Maryon, this guiding image was designed to preside over the space of the centre which he designed for the anthroposophical movement. They provided, or so Rudolf Steiner hoped, a ‘new mythology’ for the modern time – though tragically humanity’s pursuit of its new goals has too often been derailed and turned to destruction.iv

A recent historian – one of the few who has dared to tackle the obfuscations surrounding the subject of Rosicrucianism – has been able to clarify more exactly the ‘moment’ in time when those small pamphlets rocked the learned world. Frances Yates noted the links between the pamphlets and contemporary events, which centred on some significant shifts in the balance of power in Central Europe. Heidelberg and its lands, the Palatinate, was just at that period undergoing a renewal under the leadership of a new Elector, Frederick, who had also just married the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I of Great Britain.v Great hopes seemed to be invested in the new young ruler in enlightened circles, tired of the old regime which was repressive both politically and, as we have seen, in terms of stifling new thought. When he was also offered and accepted the throne of Bohemia, there was an almost frenzied expectation that he would liberalize the culture and society of his domains and make them a haven for advanced thought and religious freedom. For by taking his place on the throne in Prague, the young Frederick was following in the footsteps of an earlier, learned and unusual ruler.

The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II was a highly cultured and intelligent man, whose legacy has been interpreted in many conflicting ways. He reigned from 1576 to 1612, and early on moved his court from the traditional capital, Vienna, to Prague. There he practised alchemy and pursued his other interests, patronized the latest developments in art, and introduced a tolerationist policy in religion that many found hard to fathom, favouring neither Protestants nor Catholics – and thereby inadvertently leading to constant frustrations and brooding hostilities on both sides. Historians nowadays view his aims as consistent with the ‘Hermetic’ science which promoted an ideal of living together with the cosmos. He drew to him many, like John Dee, who shared that vision and spent six years in Prague. The rediscovery of the so-called Hermetica had been (as Frances Yates did so much to prove) one of the major events of the European Renaissance, though one which many subsequent historians had tried hard to forget. Promoted by the Florentine Academy under Cosimo de Medici as the acme of religious and philosophical truth, these pagan Mystery-writings from the period of Christian beginnings showed how the advanced, even proto-Newtonian science of the Graeco-Roman age had been used in conjunction with ritual and meditative practices to experience the divine in all things. When they surfaced again after the Middle Ages, they gave a decisive impetus to the rise of modern science – in a form closely linked with a mystical vision of the universe.vi

Eventually Rudolph was outmanoeuvred by the Hungarian Protestants who took him prisoner and forced his abdication. With his departure seemed to die the hopes for a thorough-going application of the new ideas to society and individual freedom. Until, that is, the Elector Frederick appeared in Prague. The Rosicrucians clearly felt that the Rodolphine story was far from over, and might just be entering on a new and even more significant chapter. On a deeper level, they pointed to a kind of overwhelming demand for that next step from the very nature of human development and history in recent centuries. Externally, however, it was not to be. The Catholic, Habsburg powers who dominated Europe had no intention of allowing the experiment of the previous reign to be repeated. Frederick was inevitably crushed by their armies, and the ideals he had patronized were officially relegated to obscurity. The panic that the Rosicrucian clarion call had roused among the rulers and all the vested interests across Europe led to a bloody physical suppression of their revolutionary knowledge and the freedom to use it. We still find all the evidence of that phase of mingled fascination and terror splattered across the internet now.

The Rosicrucian experiment failed. Or so on one level it seemed. But as Frances Yates has brought back into historical focus, the fallout from the eruption had a massive impact on the development of thought which we must not allow to be lost in the smoke. She gathers evidence that many of the great projects which bore fruit in later science explicitly drew on Rosicrucian inspiration: Bacon embodied his intellectual ideals in a Rosicrucian fantasy (The New Atlantis), the scientifically influential Royal Society was heir to the goals of the ‘invisible College’, social reformers and religious organizations took up their ideas of gathering like minds and changing the way we live, medicine adopted their techniques of healing with effective medicines and co-ordinated care – above all, they indicated progressive cooperation in knowledge and its application. It was these things which mean that we now have academies of science, research laboratories, teaching hospitals, social welfare programmes, etc. etc.

Scientists like Isaac Newton in physics and Robert Boyle in chemistry, we now know, were motivated by the desire to further the work of adepts like the Rosicrucians, and actively sought to cooperate with them – on the spiritual front as well as in material aspects. Newton believed his work was part of the outpouring of the spirit upon humanity that God had promised for a new age; also that it had all been known already to the initiates of old. Robert Fludd, the physician and polymath, long sought and perhaps eventually found the contact with the Rosicrucians they had originally offered. He is increasingly recognized as a towering pioneer scientist. He was co-discoverer of the circulation of the blood, along with his friend Gabriel Harvey, and both were working in the context of microcosm-macrocosm theory. History was distorted when, in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers discredited this phase of science and claimed that everything good had sprung from materialism. (It is sad when popular science writers today are crowned with laurels for perpetuating the myth.) The great advances which made modern science, in astronomy and cosmology, in chemistry and especially in medicine, all sprang from this Hermetic and Rosi-crucian impetus. Similar motives operated in the educational thought of those like Comenius. Like Paracelsus, all these men were deep Christians and, like the Rosicrucians, wanted to find a way for Christianity to move on beyond its factionalism and be able to solve the problems which had beset the Emperor Rudolph. The hero of the Chemical Wedding is a modest and poor Christian, who nevertheless holds the key to the new age of knowledge that the first two Ros-icrucian manifestos proclaimed and into which the third gives us a tantalizing peep.

*

From time to time in the ensuing centuries there are new appeals to Rosicrucian ideals and symbols. Yet no-one has ever been able to produce any evidence of a movement, still less of a secret society or an ‘order’ that continued their work. The truth may be a little more complex. The next time a real Rosicrucian drama, though hardly on the scale of the original furore, would be played out in public was essentially to be the early decades of the twentieth century.

In 1936, one Israel Regardie published a book with the trivial-sounding title of My Rosicrucian Adventure. In it he betrayed to the world an account of his activities while a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, activities concerning which his membership of that organization required him, under solemn oath, to maintain the strictest secrecy. His motives and self-justifications need hardly concern us. Certain events relating to that esoteric body had already paved the way, but it was Regardie’s decision to publish which opened the floodgates (one may fairly say) of the Golden Dawn materials which sooner or later found their way into the public domain. Nowadays a mass of ritual and ‘magical’ teaching is available for those who desire it, and who think it can be of any value outside the context for which it was intended, overseen by those who understood the techniques of deploying it.

Amateur and dilettantish goings-on abound, but the fact remains that something more seriously connected with the phenomenon of Rosicrucianism does attach to these materials. The Golden Dawn had been founded in 1888 by S.L. ‘MacGregor’ Mathers, together with William Wynn Westcott and a Dr Woodman who were both members of a Masonic organization which interests itself in Rosicrucianism (the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia). The new Order soon had Temples in London, Edinburgh and a number of other cities, and eventually in far-away New Zealand. Esoteric secrecy was for some time maintained, nevertheless the roll-call of prominent personalities and thinkers of the time who were members can only be called impressive. Mathers himself married the sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and there were figures such as the City Astronomer for Edinburgh, William Peck, medical researchers such as R.W Felkin, prominent cultural and literary names such as WB. Yeats and later Charles Williams, Florence Farr the actress (and mistress of G.B. Shaw), Irish freedom-fighter Maud Gonne (brought in of course by Yeats), occultists such as Gérard Encausse (‘Papus’) and Aleister Crowley, students of religion such as A.E. Waite and Evelyn Underhill (famous for her book on Mysticism) – and many more. The esoteric empowerment of knowledge across the range of society was still in a sense being fulfilled, and the influence of the Golden Dawn in its cultural milieu should not be underplayed.

The Hermetic Order of the G.D. in the Outer placed this activity under the aegis of traditional Hermetic science, which was taught and ‘worked’ ritually in the lower grades or ‘degrees’ by those who came into the movement. But the Order had a double structure, an esotericism within an esotericism: for after graduating through the lower degrees, the initiate would discover that an ‘Inner Order’ existed and continued their progress toward perfection, namely the Order of the Rose of Ruby and the Cross of Gold (abbreviated R.R. et A.C., from Latin Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis). At the higher level, however, the symbolism was explicitly Christian and specifically Rosicrucian.vii

The double structure recalls the theme of Rosenkreutz’s initiation in the original Rosicrucian literature. In the Fama, that hero’s contacts with the learned adepti of the East (Damascus, Fez) seem at first to deflect him from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But he stays true to his Christian goal in a higher sense, and in his symbolic tomb, containing the synthesis of all his wisdom, the name of Jesus dominates all. In the Chemical Wedding the humble Rosenkreutz becomes the guardian of the new age, points out Rolf Speckner, by observing several things which the other candidates fail to see because they are not awake, or do not know how to see higher realities in the alchemical processes they all witness.viii Their description as Knights of the Golden Stone is based on the Hermetic symbolism of the ascent of the mountain of knowledge, and the manifold transformations (inner and outer) that must be undergone, comparable to the permutations of substance in the making of gold. But only Rosenkreutz witnesses the intervention of soul-and-spirit powers which his fellow Hermetics do not see. We have here the Rosicrucian answer of the dilemma of Christian vs. pagan which was played out in the tragic events of seventeenth-century history. They stand for a higher esotericism within the revived Hermetic knowledge, as still symbolized in the Golden Dawn and its twofold organization. We have a clue here, too, to the historical riddle of why there are Rosicrucian alchemists, Rosicrucian Freemasons, Rosicrucian theurgists – but no Rosicrucian Rosicrucians.

We also have here an important key to some aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s work. The revival of spiritual knowledge (the domain of the Mysteries), in addition to conventional Christian belief, was central to his activity and was for him the most pressing need of humanity in his time. Mere belief could no longer be enough. Christianity had brought an intensified inwardness and individual link to God. It was the Rosicrucians who showed how that historical development could be reunited with Mystery-knowledge, and give rise to a Christian eso-tericism essentially linked to the spiritual needs of the modern age.

Sadly, even before Israel Regardie made known his ‘adventure’, problems in the Second Order had emerged, however, and there was break-up into several factions, each seeking a new way forward. Dr R.W. Felkin led one faction (which was also that of W.B. Yeats, as indeed it was that of Edith Maryon) in the search for a Rosicru-cian leader, pursuing the indications of a remote German origin of the Golden Dawn. Eventually, he was admitted to a gathering of high-level Rosicrucians – which brings us to our third Rosicrucian ‘sighting’. For there he was put in touch with Rudolf Steiner, who did indeed undertake to help guide the group forward in a Rosicru-cian direction. That seems to have been around 1913. Some of the seekers were incorporated in the Anthroposophical Society, some continued a semi-independent existence using Steiner’s ‘continental processes’; in all this his colleague Harry Collison (another member of the Societas Rosicruciana) was an effective go-between.ix

Steiner’s appearance in such a position provokes many interesting questions – at least some of which can be answered.

Rudolf Steiner on the Rosicrucians

At ‘the turn of the twentieth century’ Rudolf Steiner stood on the threshold of a different life as an esoteric teacher. The philosopher and cultural critic was not new even then to esoteric thought and life; what was new in that context was a powerful impression, an inner awakening to the immediate reality of Christianity as a record of spiritual transformation (death and resurrection), and of its historical impact. What he describes, in a famous chapter of his autobiography, is thus not a Christian conversion but a realization, a ‘solemn mystery of knowledge’. The active power of spiritual life worked within its rites and symbols, he saw, and with its resultant concept of Christian love springing from each individual, it had changed the course of human evolution. It had marked a new discovery of the divine from within, erupting into the historical sphere, the sphere of human relationships, and was a decisive break with the cosmic religion of antiquity.

Yet its full meaning had not yet become apparent. It did not point simply to ever increasing individualism, as modern Christian culture and its secular derivatives implied. Empowered by Christ, the emergent ego must fulfil itself through self-abnegation, that ‘emptiness’ which is also called knowledge and also freedom, and give itself for the world. And that meant historically the rediscovery of cosmic Mystery-religion, from which it had once broken away, which must now, as next stage, enable us to become spiritual stewards of the world which is entrusted to us. Christianity now needed to understand itself. If Christianity did not fulfil that role, natural knowledge would become ever more potent anyway, but it would fail to connect with human meaning and values: we could only become ever more estranged and lost. Such large and potent symbolic thought proved extraordinarily rich, overflowing in a lifetime’s devoted exposition, and may still strike us as extraordinarily relevant to the last-ditch situation we ourselves now confront ecologically and spiritually – and confront, perhaps, for the very reason we have failed to think through, let alone to solve, the issues which Rudolf Steiner so clearly saw.

His ideas were first explored in his studies of the origins of Christianity (Christianity as Mystical Fact, 1902) and of the relation between Christian thought and the beginnings of the modern world (Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, 1901). In the Rhineland mystics (especially in the beautiful chapter on Tauler but in others too), he found confirmatory traces of what he had experienced inwardly and the use of a spiritual approach in shaping even a kind of scientific mentality. Thus he identified there a kind of ‘esoteric Christianity’ that could reconnect with or had preserved a link to the goals of the old cosmic Mysteries, sometimes accused of heresy but actually pointing to Christianity’s own deepest truth in the recognition of its original Mystery-origins. How that kind of vision could be made relevant to current life and thought became the focus of his work. He spoke widely, but especially, and more esoterically, within the Theo-sophical Society, which in its first phase was an influential vehicle for spreading spiritual thought. In 1904 he gave some lectures which exemplify his range of interest: Christian festivals, Druids, Greek myths, the Logos and the atom, Freemasonry, alchemy. And some twenty years before the lectures included in this volume, he made a first and, though it has not been fully appreciated, perhaps his most brilliant contribution to understanding the Rosicrucians.

Steiner turned almost immediately to the question of Christian Rosenkreutz. In ‘Europe’, he says, he gathered round him a small group, ‘never more than ten or so’ and, ‘working within a larger organization’, he spread abroad ‘a kind of mythos’. The phraseology and particularly the mention of Europe, and the small group of followers, evoke the story of R.C. told in the Fama, and one expects to hear of the R.C. Brotherhood, their dispersion and return to find the founder’s tomb, etc. But no. Which, together with certain other features, renders it unlikely, after all, that Steiner is basing himself on the Fama. The detail of ‘never more than ten’ would indeed be an odd way to paraphrase the canonical twelve followers specified in 1614. Moreover, Steiner’s group around Rosenkreutz do not constitute a ‘brotherhood’ of their own; they work within a ‘larger organization’, and the mythos which they spread abroad is not about R.C. at all, but about the building of the Temple – it is the so-called Hiramic Legend or Temple-legend of Freemasonry.x

Obscure as all this may sound, it is a unique and almost incredibly consequential claim. At a stroke Rudolf Steiner snatches Christian Rosenkreutz from being an obscure magician whose organization can never be found, to being one of the most mysteriously influential figures in modern history. For the Hiramic legend is the charter of modern intellectual life, and through the agency of Freemasonry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it facilitated the changes in orientation and attitude without which modernity could not happen. While Church and State once more urged stagnation, Freemasonry then brought together practical craft-knowledge and intellectual grand theorizing and let workers and thinkers meet ‘on the level’. In the legend (rooted in the Bible) we hear how King Solomon received from God the inspired idea of the Temple, but lacked the practical knowledge of how to build it. So he turned to Hiram of Tyre, a powerful city-state outside Israel, who had the worldly understanding of fire and water, wood and stone – knowledge which the Bible and its Christian successors considered dangerously linked with idolatry (the Bible attributes all such matters, in fact, to the offspring of Cain – rather than the good Abel). Steiner referred the legend not to ancient history but to different ‘streams’ at all times in society. Mediaeval thought had exalted the contemplative life, the Solomonic approach; but modern life needed to bring on the development of the practical crafts and sciences, rescuing them from their tarnished ‘Cainite’ reputation and joining theory to detailed empirical know-how. That is what we mean by science – neither pure theory nor just hand-to-hand technique, but the interaction of both. Freemasonry claimed to ‘build the Temple’, and it did actually in its covert way enable scientists to meet and spread their ideas and results. It was revolutionary, and for a time highly successful and pervasive and changed the way we think.

Freemasons are the heirs of the old mystique of the builders (‘Masons’) of the great cathedrals and castles. It is obvious that a cathedral in the centre of a city is a picture of a way of life, of its values and priorities, its symbols and rhythms. But by the seventeenth century, cities had taken new forms, with prospects, parks, public buildings, and this ‘operative Masonry’ was defunct. Some Masons wished to preserve the wisdom it had enshrined, but their efforts were desultory and undirected until they were brought together around a new unified system of organization and ideology – which was the Hiramic Legend. This showed that if they could no longer build the physical basis of human action, they could build its new inner structure of attitudes and cooperation, knowledge and know-how, now ‘free’ of its old stone-hewing role. It also, in its legendary detail, showed the dangers and tensions which had to be resolved through imparting knowledge in the right ‘degree’, and so the grade-structure of Freemasonry was established, giving it power and coherence as a social movement. Where did this legendary manifesto come from? Curiously, the Freemasons themselves do not know – not even the extraordinarily learned individuals of the historical research lodge no. 2076 London, Quatuor Coronati, which has worked tirelessly to dispel the myths about Freemasonry and to bring out its genuine historical significance!xi

Whoever lies behind the symbolic name of Rosenkreutz, the idea that his work is essentially the prehistory behind the Masons’ later role, while still historically challenging, rings profoundly true and makes of him an undeniable prophetic genius – even the shaper of the modern world. The legendary account in the Fama would appear to be a cover, therefore, for the Temple-legend – we must remember that before the modern habit of betrayal, the Hiramic mythology would be esoteric and not-to-be-revealed. The twofold structure of Rosicrucianism is after all identical with the component elements of that myth: the old Mystery-wisdom of cosmic forces and craft-work (technology) must be revived, both versions agree, but must concede to the Christian development of ego-relationship and clear thought a new priority. Bringing out the Rosicrucian version initially led to events that were tumultuous but also evidently allowed the project to continue, especially in Masonry at the time when it effected a much-needed renewal of thought and social attitudes. It is not too hard to see how symbolic gestures and rites could encapsulate their message.

Steiner’s account seems to have met with approval, because in the year after the lecture he was unexpectedly invited to become part of Rosicrucian-Masonic activities by someone who convinced him of his way forward. Were it not for him, Steiner says, he would not have thought of working within a ‘historical’ stream such as Rosicru-cianism.xii Hitherto he had worked philosophically or in the broad cultural-spiritual context of the theosophical movement. In general, Freemasonry was no longer what it had been, but Steiner acknowledged that the invitation came from someone ‘who knew more of esotericism than any Mason’. Clearly, it must have been by this time clear to Steiner that Rosicrucianism had already been grappling with those deepest issues which he had come to understand through his own inner development, during his search for the hidden link between Christianity and the Mysteries, culminating in his ‘turn of the century’ work.xiii From around 1906 he speaks in his lectures, therefore, of the Christian path but alongside it mentions the Rosi-crucian path, which is most suitable for the modern age, and it is this path which he himself now consciously serves.xiv A few years later he was encountered in that role, as we have seen, by Dr Felkin, bringing after him the orphans of the Golden Dawn.

Rosicrucian esotericism does not mean joining an Order, nor indeed setting one up. It means working in that double framework embracing Mystery-wisdom and Christian development. In the work that Steiner inaugurated at this time, the Mystery-wisdom was represented firstly by adopting certain structures and symbols especially of Hermeticism; and the form in which these had come down, within the stream described, was the so-called Egyptian Freemasonry. It was certainly quite similar though not quite the same as the rites which had filtered through to form the basis of the Golden Dawn grades. Such use of ‘Egyptian’ Masonry had featured already as a setting combined with what is nowadays understood as a Rosicrucian shift to a new perspective in Mozart and Schikaneder’s operetta The Magic Flute (1791).

Steiner obtained the necessary charter for the Memphis-and-Mis-raim rite which he acquired, as he says, from ‘someone called Theodor Reuss’. This specific rite belongs to the work of John Yarker (1833-1913), who attempted to restore Freemasonry to its original spirit, but it was never brought under Grand Lodge: it is a moot point therefore whether Steiner can be described in any meaningful way as a Freemason.xv Nor did he perform any part of the old rite. Rather, with these actions, he was mapping out the structural-symbolic pathway of knowledge from the old Mystery to the new, the Christian Mysteries, not Hermetic but Rosicrucian. And this Rosicrucian inspiration filled all his significant activities of the next decade – the design and building of the Goetheanum as a festival theatre as well as centre of the Anthroposophical Society, with the threefold Statue holding pride of place; the staging of his ‘Rosicrucian Mystery-Play’ The Portal of Initiation (1910); and the development of his esoteric science and cosmology, in fulfilment of the Rosicrucian ideal of science which brings knowledge into relation with human freedom and individuation. It does not ape the perspective of the Renaissance pioneers, but completes the modern scientific development, reminding us of its spiritual dimension whether it is applied therapeutically, in agriculture, or in the theory of evolution. Such were the fruits of the path he had trodden.

The incidental link with Theodor Reuss, alas, had unforeseen consequences, since this personage went on to mix himself up with many disreputable occult goings-on, including the notorious Ordo Templi Orientis. No one has ever been able to link any of them to Steiner, but the momentary connection has furnished an endless supply of innuendo. For quite other reasons, Steiner himself subsequently discontinued this kind of esoteric work after the First World War. The events of those times make up another story. But he never disowned the Rosicrucian inspiration, and in the lectures contained in this volume he returned in fascinating detail to the actual prehistory of Ros-icrucianism in the Middle Ages. His explorations lend no credence to the fantasy of an omnipotent secret society, but offer insight into the evolution of spirituality through meditation on symbols which culminated in their use to represent the Rosicrucian path, and impresses upon us its crucially important message for our self-understanding and meaningful existence in the world today.