The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. On the Book of the Dead

Highly Esteemed Attendees!

[ 1 ] It is not possible to determine exactly when the Book of the Dead was written. In any case, it is one of the most important documents, because it shows us that in such early times in Egypt a world view, a deepening, prevailed which aimed strictly at a unified world and which, on the other hand, already had the strange urge in itself to understand death as a symbol, to understand death in such a way that it does not appear as the terrible in itself, but that it appears as that which can be seen as a symbol, as a mere allegory, which still stands high above [life]. If death is to be overcome, it is certain that death can only be overcome spiritually. It essentially deals with the transition from physical life to life after death - and that means nothing other than life in general. We can describe even more precisely what is contained in the Book of the Dead. It contains chants, hymns to the sun god Ra, to Osiris, the son of the sun god, hymns which are preferably put into the mouths of the dead. These dead who have made their way to the afterlife, these dead are to experience something, they are to gain knowledge [of what they have seen and what they are aware of from those who are no longer bound to the body. That is the first part. The second part consists of the dead person being held up to account in a kind of judgment for the debts he has incurred. He is weighed, and depending on the findings, his value appears in the overall structure of the universe. Those who have reached a high level will not - as is often said - come to Osiris, but they will become "Osiris. It is curious that the book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the [sun] god Ra, the second part deals with human destiny, the third part then shows the path to reach Osiris, the path that leads to deification. This book thus represents the path to life, the path from the individual life to the total life, which is achieved through the realization and deification of man.

[ 2 ] The details of the Book of the Dead are important in the most diverse ways for the history of the development of world views. In the Book of the Dead, for example, we find the myth of Osiris' battle with Typhon, Osiris' enemy, hatred. Isis had to find Osiris again in the universe, and she then brings forth the younger Osiris, Horus, whom she describes as the deification of the universe. We find this in the Book of the Dead.

[ 3 ] But then we also find the doctrine of the seven-part man in it. The Egyptians thought of man as being made up of the body, the spiritual body and the mummy.

So we have three stages:
1. Heart, sensation or mind,
2. Genius and creation,
3. the Holy Spirit and intelligence.

[ 4 ] These are roughly the details of this Book of the Dead, which was in any case much better known in antiquity than in later times. In later times, the awareness of the teachings as they are expressed in the Book of the Dead has been lost. However, we often find the teachings of the Book of the Dead again in Greece, and the entire Greek spiritual life in the post-Pythagorean period can only be understood if one assumes that [its] views were the teachings of this Book of the Dead, the tripartite division of the human path of knowledge and the eventual merging into the Osiris nature. If one assumes that they were transplanted to Greece and that essentially the same views lived there. However, it must be noted that the Egyptians did not have an intermediate stage that played a greater role among the Greeks, namely the myth developed with [a certain sense of] beauty. The Greeks loved to embellish everything with beauty. We have therefore been compelled to regard the entire Greek religion, the entire Greek world view, which stands between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, as an aesthetic one. We can do this if we see it as born out of Greek myth, but in its spiritualized form.

[ 5 ] We know the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the myth of the Argonauts and so on. However, we can always assume - and we have to hold on to this - that the myth exists in a threefold meaning:

1. The first meaning is that in its immediate form as the purely naturalistic conception,
2. then as a human, as a symbol and
3. thirdly as the divine.

[ 6 ] And the third, the divine, was the concept that was taught only to a select few, only to a few who had prepared themselves for it. We can already prove this historically. We are told of Samothrace, an island, that the deities there were nothing other than names for other deities. However, it is not to be believed that they were the same as the names of Greek or Egyptian deities. For outsiders, they had the same names. But for the insiders, they were deeper understandings of the entire myths and stories of the gods.

[ 7 ] The best-known Greek myth is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and then the myth of Dionysus, which has already been mentioned several times. Demeter, one of the supreme female Greek deities, was first understood in a naturalistic sense. She had a daughter with Zeus, Persephone. She was stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld. Hades had asked to be allowed to take this daughter as his wife in the underworld. She was only to remain in the upper world temporarily. She was to remain two thirds in the upper world and one third in the underworld. This myth, which is alive everywhere in Greece in its naturalistic meaning, was also that which was to be found in certain mysteries, namely that on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were based. This myth also had a threefold meaning. The naturalistic meaning lies simply in the fact that one understands the actual as such, that one has a mythological history of the gods. The second conception would then be something that took place in [Greek] life, and that was the marriage of the Ionian spirit with the Doric.

[ 8 ] The Greek people were divided into tribes. Among the most important were the Dorians and the Ionians. The myth of Demeter had originated among the Dorians, and the Ionians had adopted it and mixed it with the myth of Dionysus. We are interested in the Dionysus myth because it leads to an esoteric view. Dionysus is also a son of Zeus and Demeter. He was torn to pieces and only managed to save his heart. From this, Zeus had formed the younger Dionysus. But he could no longer take the limbs. It is therefore the case that the world represents the scattered limbs. This therefore represents the marriage of the Dorian Persephone with the Ionian Dionysus. The fusion of these two views has thus taken place in this myth.

[ 9 ] But what remains to be noted is the third, the divine conception. We can only understand this historically if we stick to the sparse information we have. We are first referred to the temple in which the service of Demeter takes place. This Demeter service is a service in which we encounter the three deities mentioned. Demeter herself is one of the greatest deities of Greece, symbolically shaped, with the inscription: "I am the origin of the soul, I am the origin of the spirit." At her side, Persephone is presented to us with the inscription: "I am death and carry within me the secret of life." Her brother Dionysus is presented to us with an even stranger inscription: "I am death, I am life, I am rebirth and adorned with wings." - If we understand this, we come to the interpretation of one of the most important Greek myths. Demeter loses her daughter. She has to give her Persephone to Hades. She could return to her mother if she had not already partaken of the fruit of the pomegranate with Hades and was therefore unable to return completely. This Persephone is supposed to save her brother. Only this makes it possible - now in a deeper sense - for Persephone to return, for Dionysus to sacrifice himself. We have to look at these two in context again. We must recognize that sacrifice is what matters here. This is shown to us by the fact that Orpheus - who is originally credited with having communicated the deeper content of this to the Greek people - was also sacrificed, for he is also said to have been torn apart and to have lived on as a spirit by having flowed out into the world matter. The child of eternal life must be sacrificed to Hades, to Pluto. We can only understand this if we see the material world in Pluto. Thus, according to the esoteric view, we see in Demeter the universal spirituality, the primordial mother of intelligence, and in Hades the material world. In the whole Persephone myth we see the necessity of Persephone's falling away from her mother. The daughter must enter matter. She must partake of the pomegranate of the underworld. Now she can no longer save herself from matter and therefore a second sacrifice is necessary. Persephone's brother, Dionysus, must sacrifice himself again. He must allow his [own] spiritual nature to flow out into the gross nature, so that Persephone now enters into a spiritual marriage with her brother, but can flow back again to the original spirit of the primordial mother, Demeter. This mystery of the spirituality's necessary departure from itself, this immersion of the spirits in the material and this longing of the spirit to return to the spiritual is expressed in the Demeter myth.

[ 10 ] This was the vivid experience that was to be taught to those who were introduced to the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were to be given the urge to find their way back from matter to the spiritual primordial mother. This is what lived in Greece in the spirit of a few chosen ones and what carried the whole world view between Pythagoras and Plato. What lived as the deeper spirit in these personalities from Empedocles through Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato sometimes appears to be merely a logical chain of thought, as presented to us by the philosophers. But it is an exposition of Greek myth, an exposition that was cultivated wherever a deeper foundation was sought. This is what appears to them as a mere logical chain of thought.

[ 11 ] I would like to point out another myth, which was cultivated even more frequently than the Demeter myth, which is perhaps easier to understand, and which was cultivated in order to gradually lead initiates into a deeper spiritual understanding of the world. I would like to refer to the myth of the Argonaut voyage. This shows in each of its individual sentences that it can only be understood as the symbolic clothing of a deeper wisdom. Phrixos and his sister Helle set off on the ram [...] to the barbarian king. On the way, Helle falls into the sea and Phrixos alone reaches the coast on the ram. When they reached the barbarian people, the ram was sacrificed to the king. But the ram's skin was hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and guarded by a great dragon. Jason, together with Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Peleus, Neleus, Admetus, Pirithoos and many others, undertakes to retrieve this ram's skin [- the golden fleece]. These are the great heroes of Greece. It is significant that Jason, with the representatives of the highest Greek spirituality, undertakes to retrieve the skin. He actually wins the skin and brings it back. The dragon guarding the skin is defeated by Jason. The dragon's teeth are then sown, and out of these grow fierce men who fight each other. Finally, in short, he gets the fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. On the way back, however, Medea decides to dismember [her] little brother Apsyrtos. The father Aietes collects the pieces and therefore does not reach the fugitives. The fleece is brought back to Greece.

[ 12 ] We must also interpret this in a threefold sense. Firstly natural, secondly human and thirdly divine. [As a human event it is of no interest, but in its divine meaning this myth perhaps leads most deeply into the Greek intellectual world.] Phrixos is divine vision, that which points us to the abyss of divine being, to the premonition of an infinite depth. Nothing else is expressed in the personality of Phrixos. [Brightness is the personality, the representative of man before his fall into sin, for whom the struggle of the spirit with materiality has not yet existed] - the undivided humanity, which is connected with nothing other than the infinite vision of infinity. [Both set out on the path to the most sacred thing they have. And the representatives of the human soul first come to the sacred grove of the gods in order to sacrifice to it and to begin the path of life with this human soul]. We have only one other person in the Argonaut train. Phrixos begins his journey through life into the realm of the barbarians on the other side of the sea. This is to be understood as the realm of passions, the realm of sensuality. The human soul is to be sacrificed to the realm of materiality. It is to be sacrificed to the waves and bustle of the world. As a result, one thing is lost, the original innocence. It is initially submerged, lost. It is initially something that has flowed out into existence. [It is something that is initially completely lost, which is why it has sunk into the Hellespont. The soul is led into life, where we have nothing but a dark urge, where we must find our way back to the higher life]. But [the soul] must be redeemed anew, just as Persephone was redeemed by Dionysus. It must be redeemed. What had to be sacrificed to life must be redeemed. It must be redeemed here by Jason, the Greek hero. The ram is sacrificed to the gods. Only the ram's skin, that which surrounds the human soul as a shell, is first hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and carefully guarded by the dragon. This is initially nothing other than what is given in the Book of the Dead. [The ram's skin] is the representative of enlightenment, of knowledge. It must first be redeemed from the fury of the terrible powers that lurk before it. The king's son Jason must overcome these forces through knowledge in conjunction with spiritual and physical forces. He must lead this ram's skin back to Greece, supported by Medea, a female figure. I have already pointed out that the female figure signifies a state of consciousness in Greek. The soul must be redeemed with the help of Medea's magical power. From this immersion she can then be led back up to her deification, her divinization. That is the deeper meaning of the Argonaut saga.

[ 13 ] The fact that the young son of Aietes, Medea's brother, has to be killed so that Medea's father cannot reach [the fleeing Jason] also has its significance. The one who has achieved this must leave behind many things that have been in his life. He has to leave some things behind, for the reason that [he cannot be caught up] on the path to deeper knowledge. This is how the saga of the Argonauts concludes. Basically, it is nothing more than a different version, more tailored to the individuality of man, of the myth that we also encounter in the Demeter myth.

[ 14 ] This conception of the Greek myth then confronts us in a philosophically one-sided formation in a personality that represents a kind of fall from grace for the Greek world view: in Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. He first pointed out in an intellectual or rational way that sensual knowledge cannot satisfy man. He pointed out that man cannot get to the bottom of things and that the weighing up and weighing down of the world cannot be the truth, but that the truth must be something much deeper, that it can only be purely spiritual. He first put this into this form: true existence can only be achieved through pure thinking, through the deepest knowledge, while the senses only present us with a dream. - Parmenides thus divides the whole of existence into two parts, into sensual illusion on the one hand and intellectual, mental existence on the other. But there is still something that he could not find, and that is the ego. He could not find the figure of Dionysus in the figure of Persephone, in the urge to emerge from the sensual, the spirit. Parmenides did not take this [step]. He only saw that which is enchanted in the sensual world and on the other side Demeter [and Hades], the materiality. But he was unable to find the path that unites the two.

[ 15 ] In a slightly different form, we encounter the same thing in Empedocles, who said that the primordial being had dissolved into a series of elements, into fire, water, earth and air. In these four elements he saw nothing other than individual eternal manifestations of the primordial being, the eternal world spirit. And in every single thing he saw certain mixtures of the four elements, even in man. The fact that the human being also consists of a mixture of the same elements as the world means that the human being can understand the world. The same can be recognized by the same. This is the same thing that Goethe says:

Were not the eye sun-like,
it could never behold the sun.
If God's own power were not in us,
how could the divine delight us?

[ 16 ] This view was already held by Empedocles. He even had the view that the essence reigns in all being, [so that] he already [anticipated] the saying in Goethe's "Faust": "Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything ..." [anticipated]. Empedocles already recognized this totality of being. He believed that before it rises to the higher, it must pass through the lower stages. The spirit must pass through the stages of inorganic, elementary existence, the stages from plant to animal existence up to the form of man, and always follow them. This is why he sees love and hate as what brings the elements together. Empedocles thus describes life as a constant struggle between love and hate. In this way, the worldly sage also repeats the battle between [Osiris-Isis and Typhon] and the battle between Persephone and [Hades].

[ 17 ] So we see in the Empedoclean doctrine nothing other than the elaboration of what [Empedocles] could get to know in the Greek mystery schools. We shall see that he does not consider anything incomprehensible that is described to the philosophers as incomprehensible.

[ 18 ] We are told that human existence is not completed in the single individuality, but that this human existence was already there before it entered the individual personality, and that it will also be there again in other forms and shapes after it leaves this personality. In short, [Empedocles] stands on the standpoint of the transmigration of souls, of metempsychosis. He was initiated into the teachings of the Pythagoreans. The philosophers could not understand how Empedocles arrived at this doctrine if he assumed that the soul is a mere mixture of the four elements, but still ascribes to it a special existence in that it can take on different forms. We will understand that Empedocles sees in these four elements nothing other than the one eternal primordial being that has poured itself into existence, and that we therefore have to see in them only a special form of existence that flows back again to the primordial being. Thus in the spiritual conception of Empedocles we have something higher than the merely sensual. Empedoclean philosophy is nothing more than a philosophical dissection of the Argonaut legend, the legend of Demeter and Persephone and so on.

[ 19 ] These teachings were then adopted by Socrates and Plato, and we are not to understand the historical Socrates in the figure of Socrates when we encounter him in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates appears to Plato as the master of the school, and he represents the school in his conversations. Socrates was regarded by Plato as such a leader. In the Platonic Discourses, it is not the historical Socrates who is the main subject, but the spiritual leader, the one who leads from the lowest levels of knowledge up to the highest. We cannot understand the meaning of the Platonic Conversations if we do not understand them as a mental image of mystical instruction, as instruction and guidance from the lowest to the highest levels of knowledge.

[ 20 ] The other day I mentioned the talk about the immortality of the soul. This is usually understood as if immortality were to be proven by a logical thread. But it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul, and what has been written about whether the proof has succeeded or failed. If it is said that the proof is no longer congenial to us today, then the person concerned only shows that he has not grasped the whole spirit of the "Phaidon". It is not a question of proving whether the soul is immortal, but of something quite different. We can assume that Plato also went through the schools of [the] Sophists. Protagoras was the founder of the "phrase: he is portrayed [in the Platonic dialog "Protagoras"] as someone who led knowledge astray. But we must not forget that Socrates was a profound [ironist]. We must not forget that the Greeks had their own conception of irony, that they understood it as something that was necessary for the illumination of the whole world view. Socrates fought the sophists with irony. What are the sophists? The sentences uttered by Protagoras characterize them:

[ 21 ] ["Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are - of those that are not, that they are not." And:] We cannot prove anything rigorously. One thing can be said of every thing, but the opposite can also be said of every thing. This seemed to be the destruction of all knowledge. Even today it seems as if the sophists were playing a vain game with ideas, as if they wanted nothing more than to talk about every thing. Vanity was their purpose, as the measure of all things was only purpose. The Sophists by no means took this absurd and downright frivolous standpoint. The Sophists are, if I may say so, the personalities within Greek intellectual life who wanted to reduce to absurdity the knowledge that flows purely from the intellect, but who also put into practice in a different way the old Apollonian sentence: "Man is the measure of all things", which means nothing other than that man has to rise and seek within himself. - Do not recognize yourself with random intellectual knowledge, but immerse yourself in your true self. - They adjusted themselves to pure logic on a trial basis in order to lead them all the more surely into error. You can prove the one, and you can prove the other. But the sophists only wanted to show the worthlessness of logic. It is worthless to stop at what we encounter externally, at purely intellectual knowledge. Man would have to be just as unsatisfied in this knowledge as he would have to be unsatisfied within a purely mindless sensory life.

[ 22 ] Plato had become acquainted with this sophism, and he apparently fought it, not because he regarded it as a worthless phenomenon, but as an irony. He took the standpoint of Protagoras, and Protagoras always falls short of Socrates, who does not want to grasp the world through reason, but through immediate life and through the mind. But this is not a different point of view from the one put forward by the Sophists. The sophists wanted to be opposed because they wanted to expose the absurdity of these propositions in order to show where each proposition leads. Thus Socrates, by leading beyond sophistry, led to deeper knowledge. He liberates his students from the belief in reason. This redemption is expressed to us in all those conversations [in which the sophists, Socrates' immediate predecessors, are combated]. The Discourses are written for the sole purpose of disabusing people of the belief in the provability of higher knowledge. That is the purpose of the Platonic Discourse. No one will believe that a flower can be proved. No one will seek proof that a flower exists. It is enough if we experience existence. You cannot prove a thing. You can prove the connection between things. You can prove that some fact must be there, from a context that you have already perceived. But you can never prove a thing that you have absolutely not perceived. So it is not a question of proving something logically, but of expanding the field of experience, of opening up the field of experience into a metaphysical realm. Something should be opened up that lies behind experience. [So it should not say: Here you have experience, and you should pay attention to something that lies behind it. It should not be deduced logically, but experienced spiritually. It should not be proven, but experienced.

[ 23 ] This is also the case in the "Phaidon". You have to experience what Socrates means by "soul". He does not want to prove that the soul is immortal, but he wants to lead his students to experience the soul in the same way as the body. The "Phaidon" is about the discovery of the soul. It is about experiencing the soul. When his students have really experienced "soul, then [its] characteristics will soon become clear to them. If you want to be shown a flower, you show him the flower and don't let him prove it.

[ 24 ] This is what is meant by the Socratic method. The Socratic method is usually understood in a much more trivial way. The Socratic method means nothing other than the opening of a completely new field of experience, the opening of new senses, the opening of a new field of experience, and the teaching of Socrates is such that every person can be led to such higher [cognitive] powers. And the leading to such powers in the Socratic method is the conversation.

[ 25 ] We will find in the conversations the most profound method and the truest mysticism, and we will see the form in which [Greek] mysticism has expressed itself in the most profound and experiential way. I am convinced that Plato's teaching can only be understood superficially, that the doctrine of ideas can only be seen as an emptiness of ideas, if one does not draw this doctrine of ideas from the depths of Greek spiritual life, if one does not take into account the tragedy of life that the myth of Demeter expresses by showing that the dearest thing Demeter has must first fall away in order to then seek the way back again. And in the Argonaut legend, it is depicted that man must lose himself on the path of life in order to be able to redeem himself again with the help of his new powers. That saga thus expresses to us the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that [knowledge] must first be lost, sunk into the depths of materiality, and that it can only be found again by way of complete self-denial - and only by giving up many a love. And this expresses that this rediscovery of the highest knowledge is linked with the true redemption of this knowledge, with the finding of the infinite in the finite, with the overcoming of individuality, that therefore this knowledge can only be achieved through one of the most original forces that rule in man; and this again expresses itself meaningfully through the emergence of human vision, that which Phrixos has to sacrifice first, the vision which leads us into the indeterminate and into the deepest depths, which leads us to the point that we can never be satisfied and that we can only find ourselves on the perpetual path back to Demeter. This realization means the infinite path to rediscover lost knowledge. This is expressed in the distinction between the lower and higher consecrations.

[ 26 ] When Schelling passed from his youth to a later age, he distinguished the teachings of his youth, which express the most spiritual and profound. He later expressed this philosophy of his youth as a lower consecration compared to his later one, because the height of that vision had dawned on him, in which he recognized that there are abyss-like depths that can never be reached [with the ordinary powers of thought]. The realization of certain spiritual powers to encompass this world is what he calls [higher] consecration. To lose this faith altogether in comparison to the lower consecration and to believe and experience the omnipotence of the infinite depth, which has been lost to us, is the infinite love into which the divine principle has flowed and can be found again through this infinite. This is what he calls the "higher consecration."

Questions and Answers:

Question about the sacrifice of Abraham.

[ 27 ] These teachings of the Old Testament are a distortion. Jewish secret teachings then emerge, in which these things are then pulled together again. It is the same as in the legends of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus. In them the doctrine of man is carried out in a tangible way. The Abraham sacrifice would correspond to the second stage of the human stages, the necessity of sacrificing one's loved one. It is undoubtedly taken from religious systems in which this school of thought lives.

[ 28 ] It must be assumed for a whole series of Christian myths that in the year 1 there was no awareness of the esoteric side at all. Paul was the founder of Christianity, which has lived in the church right up to our time.

[ 29 ] If I interpret the "Sistine Madonna" esoterically and someone tells me that Raphael knew nothing about it, I say: Yes, it doesn't need to be. If that is attempted, I have to be pleased and regard it as a perfectly justifiable thing. I am always pleased when people try to show this. The philosophers in the pulpits don't get involved in esotericism. The most important is Kühnemann.

[ 30 ] In Empedocles, there is something we cannot understand. We can only present [it] as something incomprehensible; all modern research deals only with the purely natural conception of the matter and finally only with the question of its origin, with the question: How could something like this have developed?