The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Mysteries and Mystery Wisdom

[ 1 ] Something like a mysterious veil lies over the way in which, within the ancient cultures, those who sought a deeper religious and cognitive life than the popular religions could offer satisfied their spiritual needs. We are led into the darkness of mysterious cults when we investigate the satisfaction of such needs. Every personality that finds such satisfaction eludes our observation for some time. We see how at first the popular religions cannot give her what her heart seeks. She recognizes the gods; but she knows that in the ordinary views of the gods the great mysteries of existence are not revealed. She seeks a wisdom that carefully guards a community of priestly wisdom. It seeks refuge in this community for the striving soul. If it is found to be mature by the wise, it is led by them from step to step up to higher insight in a way that eludes the eye of the outsider. What happens to it is concealed from the uninitiated. For a time, she seems to be completely removed from the earthly world. She appears as if she has been transported into a secret world - and when she is returned to the light of day, another, a completely transformed personality stands before us. A personality who cannot find words sublime enough to express how meaningful the experience has been for her. She does not appear figuratively mere, but in the sense of highest reality as having passed through death and awakened to a new higher life. And she is clear about the fact that no one can really understand her words unless they have experienced something similar.

[ 2 ] So it was with the people who were initiated through the Mysteries into that mysterious wisdom which was withdrawn from the people and which shed light on the highest questions. This "secret" religion of the elect existed alongside the religion of the people. Its origins are blurred by the historical view into the darkness of the origin of peoples. It can be found everywhere among the ancient peoples, as far as we can gain an insight into it. The sages of these peoples speak of the mysteries with the greatest reverence. - What was concealed in them? And what did they reveal to those who were initiated into them?

[ 3 ] The mysteriousness of their appearance is heightened when one realizes that the Mysteries were also regarded by the ancients as something dangerous. The path to the mysteries of existence led through a world of horrors. And woe betide anyone who tried to reach them unworthily. - There was no greater crime than "betraying" the secrets to the uninitiated. The "traitor" was punished with death and confiscation of goods. We know that the poet Aeschylus was accused of having brought some of the mysteries onto the stage. He could only escape death by fleeing to the altar of Dionysus and proving in court that he was not an initiate at all.

[ 4 ] What the ancients say about these mysteries is meaningful but also ambiguous. The initiate is convinced that it is sinful to say what he knows; and also that it is sinful for the uninitiated to hear it. Plutarch speaks of the terror of the initiates and compares their state to the preparation for death. A special way of life had to precede the initiations. It was designed to bring sensuality under the control of the spirit. Fasting, solitary life, mortification and certain spiritual exercises were to serve this purpose. Whatever man clings to in ordinary life should lose all value for him. The whole direction of his sensory and emotional life had to change. - There can be no doubt about the meaning of such exercises and trials. The wisdom that was to be offered to the initiate could only have the right effect on his soul if he had first transformed his lower emotional world. He was introduced to the life of the spirit. He was to see a higher world. He could not gain a relationship with it without prior exercises and tests. It was this relationship that mattered. Whoever wants to think rightly about these things must have experience of the intimate facts of the life of knowledge. He must feel that there are two widely divergent relationships to what the highest knowledge offers. - The world that surrounds man is first of all his real world. He feels, hears and sees its processes. He calls them real because he perceives them with his senses. And he thinks about them in order to clarify their connections. - What arises in his soul, on the other hand, is not initially real to him in the same sense. They are "mere" thoughts and ideas. At most, he sees images of sensual reality in them. They themselves have no reality. They cannot be touched; they cannot be heard or seen.

[ 5 ] There is a different relationship to the world. Those who are absolutely attached to the kind of reality just described will hardly understand it. It arises for certain people at a certain point in their lives. For them, the whole relationship to the world is reversed. They call entities that emerge in the spiritual life of their soul truly real. And what the senses hear, feel and see, they attribute only a lower kind of reality to. They know that they cannot prove what they are saying. They know that they can only tell about their new experiences. And that with their stories they face the other person in the same way as the sighted person does with the communication of the perceptions of his eye to the blind person. They undertake the communication of their inner experiences in the confidence that there are others around them whose spiritual eye is still closed, but whose mental understanding can be made possible by the power of what they have shared. For they have faith in humanity and want to be spiritual eye-openers. They can only lay down the fruits which their spirit has plucked itself; whether the other sees them depends on whether he has understanding for what a spiritual eye sees.^{1It is said above that those whose spiritual eyes are open can see into the realm of the spiritual world. But this should not lead to the conclusion that only those who have the "spiritual eyes" themselves can have an understanding judgment of the initiate's findings. These belong only to research; when what has been researched is then communicated, anyone who lets his reason and his unbiased sense of truth speak can understand it. And such a one can also apply these results in life and derive satisfaction from them without already having the "spiritual eyes" himself.} - There is something in man that initially prevents him from seeing with spiritual eyes. At first he is not there for this purpose. He is what he is according to his senses; and his mind is only the explainer and judge of his senses. These senses would fulfill their task badly if they did not insist on the faithfulness and infallibility of their statements. An eye would be a bad eye if it did not assert the unconditional reality of its visual perceptions from its point of view. The eye is right in itself. Nor does it lose its right through the mind's eye. This spiritual eye only allows us to see the things of the sensual eye in a higher light. One then denies nothing of what the sensual eye has seen. But a new brilliance radiates from what you have seen that you did not see before. And then one knows that at first one has only seen a lower reality. One now sees the same thing; but one sees it immersed in a higher one, in the spirit. It is now a question of whether one also senses and feels what one sees. He who stands alone with living sensations and feelings towards the sensual, sees in the higher a mirage, a "mere" figment of the imagination. His feelings are only directed towards the sensual. He reaches into the void when he wants to grasp the spiritual formations. They retreat from him when he wants to touch them. They are just "mere" thoughts. He thinks them; he does not live in them. They are images to him, more unreal than scurrying dreams. They rise up as foamy formations when he confronts his reality; they disappear in the face of the solid, firmly built reality of which his senses inform him. -It is different for those who have changed their sensations and feelings towards reality. For him, this reality has lost its absolute stability, its unconditional value. His senses and feelings need not become dull. But they begin to doubt their absolute dominance; they leave room for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate this space.

[ 6 ] There is a possibility here that can be terrible. It is that man loses his sensations and feelings for the immediate reality and no new one opens up before him. He then floats as if in a void. He feels as if he has died. The old values are gone and no new ones have arisen for him. The world and man are then no longer there for him. -But this is not a mere possibility. It becomes a reality for everyone who wants to attain higher knowledge. He arrives at the point where the spirit declares all life to be death. He is then no longer in the world. He is under the world - in the underworld. He completes the descent into Hades. Blessed is he if he does not sink now. If a new world opens up before him. He either fades away; or he stands before himself anew as a transformed man. In the latter case, a new sun, a new earth stands before him. The whole world is reborn to him from the spiritual fire.

[ 7 ] And so the initiates describe what has become of them through the Mysteries. Menippus says that he traveled to Babylon to be led to Hades and back again by the successors of Zoroaster. He says that he swam through the great waters on his travels; that he passed through fire and ice. One hears from the mystics that they were frightened by a drawn sword and that "blood flowed". One understands such words when one knows the place of passage from the lower to the higher knowledge. One has felt for oneself how all solid matter, how all sensuality has melted into water; one had lost all ground. Everything that had previously been perceived as alive had been killed. As a sword passes through the warm body, the spirit has passed through all sensual life; one has seen the blood of sensuality flowing.

[ 8 ] But a new life has appeared. One has risen from the underworld. The orator Aristides speaks of this. "I believed I could touch the god, feel his approach, and I was between waking and sleep; my spirit was so light that no one who is not "initiated" can say and understand it." This new existence is not subject to the laws of the lower life. Becoming and passing away do not affect it. One can talk a lot about the eternal; whoever does not mean what those who speak of it after the descent into Hades say, their words are "smoke and mirrors". The initiates have a new view of life and death. Only now do they consider themselves authorized to speak of immortality. They know that whoever speaks of immortality without the knowledge of those who speak of it from the consecrations, says something about it that he does not understand. Such a one ascribes immortality only to a thing that is subject to the laws of becoming and passing away. It is not the mere conviction of the eternity of the core of life that the Mystics want to gain. According to the view of the Mysteries, such a conviction would be without any value. For according to such a view, the eternal does not exist alive in the non-mystic. If he spoke of an eternal, he would be speaking of nothing. Rather, it is this eternal itself that the mystics seek. They must first awaken the eternal within themselves; then they can speak of it. That is why Plato's harsh saying that sinking into mud has full reality for them, ^{2the “sinking into mud” of which Plato speaks must also be interpreted in the sense of what has just been added as a remark on page 21.} who is not initiated; and that only he enters eternity who has gone through mystical life. This is the only way to understand the words in the Sophocles fragment: "How delighted those who are initiated enter the realm of shadows. They live there alone—the others are destined only for misery and adversity."

[ 9 ] So are we not describing dangers when we speak of the mysteries? Is it not a happiness, indeed a life value of the highest kind, that one robs from the one whom one leads to the gate of the underworld? After all, the responsibility that one thereby takes upon oneself is terrible. And yet: can we evade this responsibility? These were the questions the initiate had to ask himself. He was of the opinion that the popular mind relates to his knowledge as darkness relates to light. But in this darkness dwells an innocent happiness. It was the opinion of the mystics that this happiness should not be sacrilegiously interfered with. For what would it have been in the first place if the Myst had "betrayed" his secret? He would have spoken words, nothing but words. Nowhere would have been the feelings and emotions that would have struck the spirit from these words. The preparation, the exercises and tests, the whole change in the sensory life would have been part of it. Without these, the listener would have been hurled into emptiness, into nothingness. What constituted his happiness would have been taken from him, and nothing could have been given in return. Indeed, nothing could even have been taken from him. For his emotional life could not have been changed by mere words. He could only have felt, experienced reality in the things of his senses. Nothing more than a terrible, life-destroying premonition could have been given to him. It should have been seen as a crime. This can no longer be fully valid for the attainment of knowledge of the spirit in the present. This can be understood conceptually because the newer humanity has a conceptual ability that the old one lacked. Today there can be people who have knowledge of the spiritual world through their own experience; and they can be confronted by those who understand this experience conceptually. The older mankind lacked such a conceptual ability. The ancient wisdom of the Mysteries is like a hothouse plant that must be nurtured and cared for in seclusion. Whoever brings it into the atmosphere of everyday views gives it an air of life in which it cannot flourish. It melts into nothing before the caustic judgment of modern science and logic. Let us therefore for a time divest ourselves of all the education that microscopes, telescopes and scientific thinking have brought us; let us cleanse our hands, which have become too busy with dissection and experimentation, so that we can enter the pure temple of the mysteries. This requires true impartiality.^{3What is said about the impossibility of communicating the teachings of the Mysteries refers to the fact that they cannot be communicated in the form in which the Initiate experiences them to the unprepared; but in the form in which they can be understood by the uninitiated, they have always been communicated. The myths, for example, gave the old form to communicate the content of the mysteries in a generally understandable way.}

[ 10 ] For the mystic, the first thing that matters is the mood in which he approaches what he perceives as the highest, as the answers to the riddles of existence. Especially in our time, in which people only want to recognize the grossly scientific as knowledge, it is difficult to believe that the highest things depend on a mood. Knowledge is thereby made into an intimate matter of personality. For the mystic, however, it is such a matter. Tell someone the solution to the riddle of the world! Give it to him ready-made! The myst will find that everything is empty sound unless the personality confronts this solution in the right way. This solution is nothing; it flutters away if the feeling does not catch the special fire that is necessary. A deity confronts you! It is either nothing or everything. It is nothing when you meet it in the mood in which you encounter the things of everyday life. It is everything when you are prepared for it, in tune with it. What it is for itself is a matter that does not affect you: whether it leaves you as you are or whether it makes you into a different person: that is what matters. But that depends only on you. An education, a development of the most intimate powers of the personality must have prepared you so that what a divinity is capable of may be kindled in you. It depends on the reception you give to what is offered to you. Plutarch spoke of this education; he spoke of the greeting that the Myste offers to the deity who confronts him: "For the god greets, as it were, each one of us who approaches him here with this: Know thyself, which is certainly no worse than the usual greeting: Hail. But we reply to the deity with the words: You are, and thus bring her the greeting of being as the true, original and solely hers. -For we have actually here no share in this being, but every mortal nature, lying in the middle between origin and destruction, shows only an appearance and a weak and uncertain sense of itself; if one now tries to grasp it with the intellect, it is like strongly compressed water, which merely coagulates through the pressure and compression and spoils what is embraced by it; for the mind, in pursuing the all too clear conception of every being subject to chance and change, soon strays to its origin, soon to its destruction, and can grasp nothing permanent or really existing. For, as Heraclitus expresses it, one cannot swim twice in the same wave, nor can one grasp a mortal being twice in the same state, but by the violence and rapidity of movement it destroys itself and reunites; it comes into being and passes away; it comes to and goes from. Therefore that which comes into being can never attain to true being, because generation never ceases or comes to a standstill, but begins the change as early as the seed, forming an embryo, then a child, then a youth, a man, an old man and an old man, always destroying the first formations and ages by those that follow. Therefore it is ridiculous for us to fear one death, since we have already died and are dying in so many ways. For not only, as Heraclitus says, is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death of air the birth of water, but one can perceive this even more clearly in man himself; the strong man dies when he becomes an old man, the youth when he becomes a man, the boy when he becomes a youth, the child when he becomes a boy. Yesterday is dying in today, today is dying in tomorrow; none remains or is a single thing, but we become many things as matter drifts around an image, around a common form. For how could we, if we were always the same, now take pleasure in other things than before, love and hate the opposite things, admire and blame, speak differently, surrender to other passions, if we did not also take on a different shape, different forms and different senses? For without change it is impossible to enter into another state, and he who changes is no longer the same; but if he is not the same, he is no longer the same and changes for this very reason, by becoming another. It is only because we do not know true existence that we are seduced by sensory perception into mistaking what merely appears to be so." (Plutarch, On the "EI" at Delphi, 17 and 18 ).

[ 11 ] Plutarch often characterizes himself as an initiate. What he describes here is a condition of the mystical life. Man attains a wisdom through which the spirit first sees through the illusory nature of sensual life. Everything that sensuality regards as being, as reality, is immersed in the flow of becoming. And just as this happens with all other things in the world, it also happens with man himself. He himself flutters away before his spiritual eye; his wholeness dissolves into parts, into transient phenomena. Birth and death lose their distinctive meaning; they become moments of coming into being and passing away like everything else that happens. The highest cannot be found in the context of becoming and passing away. It can only be sought in that which is truly permanent, that which looks back to the past and looks forward to the future. It is a higher level of knowledge: to find this looking back and looking forward. It is the spirit that reveals itself in and through the sensual. It has nothing to do with sensory becoming. It does not arise and does not pass away in the same way as sensory phenomena. Whoever lives in the sense world alone has this spirit within him as a hidden one; whoever sees through the illusory nature of the sense world has it within him as a revealed reality. He who reaches this kind of insight has developed a new member in himself. Something has happened to him like the plant that first had only green leaves and then sprouts a colorful blossom. Certainly, the forces that gave rise to the flower were already hidden in the plant before the blossom came into being, but they only became real with this development. The divine-spiritual forces also lie hidden in the merely sensual human being; but only in the mystic are they a manifest reality. Therein lies the transformation that has taken place with the mystic. He has added something new to the pre-existing world through his development. The sensual world has turned him into a sensual human being and then left him to his own devices. Nature has thus fulfilled its mission. What it itself can do with the forces at work in man has been exhausted. But these powers themselves are not yet exhausted. They lie enchanted in the purely natural human being and await their redemption. They cannot redeem themselves; they disappear into nothingness if man does not seize them and develop them further; if he does not awaken to real existence that which lies hidden within him. - Nature develops from the imperfect to the perfect. From the lifeless it leads the beings through a wide series of stages through all forms of the living to the sensual human being. In his sensuality he opens his eyes and becomes aware of himself as a sensual-real, changeable being. But he also senses the forces within himself from which this sensuality is born. These forces are not the changeable, because the changeable has arisen from them. Man carries them within himself as a sign that more lives in him than what he sensually perceives. What can become through them is not yet. Man feels that something lights up within him which creates everything, including himself; and he feels that this something will be that which will inspire him to higher creation. It is in him, it was before his sensual appearance and will be after it. He has become through it, but he may grasp it and participate in its creation himself. Such feelings live in the old mystic after the initiation. He felt the eternal, the divine. His actions should become a part of the creation of this divine. He may say to himself: I have discovered a higher "I" in myself, but this "I" reaches beyond the limits of my sensual becoming; it was before my birth, it will be after my death. This "I" has created from eternity; it will create for eternity. My sensual personality is a creature of this "I". But it has incorporated me into itself; it creates in me; I am its part. What I now create is something higher than the sensual. My personality is only a means for this creating power, for this divine in me. This is how the Myste experienced his deification.

[ 12 ] The mystics called their true spirit the power that shone forth within them. They were the results of this spirit. As if a new being had entered them and taken possession of their organs, so their condition seemed to them. It was a being that stood between them, as sensual personalities, and between the omnipotent world power, the Godhead. The Myste sought this true spirit of his. I have become man in the great nature: thus he said to himself. But nature has not completed its work. I must accomplish this perfection myself. But I cannot do it in the coarse realm of nature, to which my sensual personality also belongs. What can develop in this realm is developed. Therefore I must leave this realm. I must continue to build in the realm of the spirits, where nature has come to a standstill. I must create for myself an air of life that cannot be found in outer nature. This air of life was prepared for the Mystics in the Mystery Temples. There the forces slumbering within them were awakened; there they were transformed into higher, creative, spiritual natures. This transformation was a delicate process. It could not tolerate the harsh air of the day. But once he had fulfilled his task, man had become a rock through him, founded in the eternal and able to withstand all storms. But he was not allowed to believe that he could communicate what he experienced to others in a direct form.

[ 13 ] Plutarch states that "the greatest insights and interpretations about the true nature of demons can be found in the mysteries". And from Cicero we learn that in the mysteries, "when they are explained and traced back to their meaning, the nature of things is recognized more than that of the gods" (Plutarch, On the Decay of Oracles; and Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods). From such statements it is clear that the mystics were able to provide higher insights into the nature of things than those provided by popular religion. Indeed, one can see from this that the demons, i.e. the spiritual entities, and the gods themselves needed an explanation. One therefore went back to beings of a higher nature than demons and gods. And this was the essence of mystery wisdom. The people presented gods and demons in images whose content was taken entirely from the sensual-real world. Should not those who understood the essence of the eternal be misled by the eternity of such gods! How could the Zeus of the popular imagination be an eternal one, since he bore the characteristics of a transient being? - One thing was clear to the mystics: man arrives at his conception of the gods in a different way from his conception of other things. A thing in the outside world forces me to form a very specific idea of it. In contrast to this way, the formation of ideas of the gods has something free, even arbitrary about it. The compulsion of the outside world is absent. Reflection teaches us that with the gods we imagine something for which there is no external control. This places man in a state of logical uncertainty. He begins to feel that he is the creator of his gods. Indeed, he asks himself: how do I come to go beyond physical reality in my imaginary world? Myste had to indulge in such thoughts. He had justified doubts. Just look, he thought, at all the ideas of the gods. Are they not like the creatures one encounters in the sensory world? Has not man created them by adding or subtracting these or those qualities from the essence of the sensory world? The uncultivated man who loves the chase creates a heaven for himself in which the most glorious hunts for the gods are held. And the Greek places gods-personalities in his Olympus for whom the models were in the well-known Greek reality.

[ 14 ] The philosopher Xenophanes (575 to 480) pointed out this fact with harsh logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were thoroughly dependent on mystery wisdom. Starting with Heraclitus, this will be demonstrated in particular. Therefore, what Xenophanes says can be taken without further ado as mystical conviction. It says:

[ 15 ] People who think the gods created in their image,
Their senses they shall have and voice and body.
But if hands possessed the oxen or the lions,
To paint with their hands and do work like men
They would paint the forms of the gods and form the bodies
As they themselves would be in body each one,
Horses like horses and oxen like cattle.

[ 16 ] Man can become a doubter of everything divine through such insight. He can reject the divine poems and only recognize as reality what his sensual perceptions force him to do. But the Myste did not become such a doubter. He realized that this doubter is like a plant that says to itself: my colorful flower is null and vain; for I am finished with my green leaves; what I add to them only increases them by a deceptive appearance. But neither could the Myste remain with the gods thus created, with the gods of the people. If the plant could think, it would realize that the forces that created the green leaves are also destined to create the colored flower. But it would not rest to investigate these forces itself in order to see them. And so the Myste did with the folk gods. He did not deny them, he did not declare them to be vain; but he knew that they were created by man. The same forces of nature, the same divine element that create in nature, also create in the Mystic. And in him they create ideas of the gods. He wants to see this god-creating power. It is not like the popular gods; it is something higher. Xenophanes also points to this:

[ 17 ] A god is the greatest among gods and among men,
Neither like mortals in body nor even in thought.

[ 18 ] This god was also the god of mysteries. He could be called a "hidden god". For nowhere - so one imagined - can he be found by the merely sensual human being. Turn your eyes outwards to things; you will not find anything divine. Exert your intellect; you may understand the laws according to which things come into being and pass away; but even your intellect shows you nothing divine. Imbue your imagination with religious feeling; you can create images of beings that you may take for gods, but your intellect will tear them apart, for it will prove to you that you have created them yourself and borrowed the material for them from the world of the senses. Insofar as you as an understanding human being look at the things around you, you must be a denier of God. For God is not for your senses and for your intellect, which explains sensual perceptions to you. God is just enchanted in the world. And you need his own power to find him. You must awaken this power in yourself. These are the teachings that an old initiate received. And now the great world drama began for him, in which he was swallowed up alive. This drama consisted of nothing less than the redemption of the enchanted God. Where is God? That was the question that confronted the mystic's soul. God is not, but nature is. He must be found in nature. In it he has found his magic tomb. In a higher sense the mystic puts the words: God is love. For God has taken this love to the extreme. He has given himself in infinite love; he has poured himself out; he has fragmented himself into the multiplicity of natural things; they live, and he does not live in them. He rests in them. He lives in man. And man can experience the life of God in himself. If he is to let him come to knowledge, he must redeem this knowledge by creating it. - Man now looks into himself. As hidden creative power, still without existence, the divine works in his soul. In this soul there is a place where the enchanted divine can come to life again. The soul is the mother that can receive the divine from nature. If the soul allows itself to be fertilized by nature, it will give birth to the divine. It is born from the marriage of the soul with nature. This is no longer a "hidden" divine, it is a revealed one. It has life, perceptible life that walks among men. It is the disenchanted spirit in man, the offspring of the enchanted divine. The great God, who was, is and will be, he is certainly not; but in a certain sense he can be taken as its revelation. The Father remains quietly hidden; the Son is born to man from his own soul. Mystical knowledge is thus a real process in the world process. It is the birth of a sprout of God. It is a process as real as another natural process, only on a higher level. This is the great secret of the mystic, that he himself creates and redeems his sprout of God, but that he first prepares himself to recognize this sprout of God which he has created. The non-mystic lacks the perception of the father of this sprout. For this father rests in enchantment. The sprout appears virgin-born. The soul seems to have given birth to it unfertilized. All its other births are conceived by the sense world. One sees and feels the father here. He has sensual life. The offspring of God alone is conceived by the eternal, hidden Father-God himself.