The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. The Great Mysteries Of Hibernia

I have told you certain things about the Hibernian Mysteries and you heard yesterday that through the remarkable development which it was possible for individuals to achieve in Ireland, insight came to them into what the human soul can experience as a result of its own inner activity. All the preparations undergone by the candidate for Initiation made it possible for pictures of landscapes to be conjured up as though by magic before his senses—landscapes which in other circumstances were seen in the ordinary way. The impressions received in the Mysteries were not fantastic or hallucinatory but what the pupil had been accustomed to see now seemed to have been like a veil which he knew well was concealing something behind it. And the same applied when the pupil had directed his gaze into his own inner being, when the enchanted vision of the dreamlike summer landscape was conjured up before him. He was now made ready to have Imaginations which, to begin with, were linked with what in other circumstances he perceived with his outer senses. But he knew that these Imaginations would lead him to something altogether different.

I have told you how the pupil reached the stage where he was able to have a vision of the time before his earthly existence, and also of the time after that existence, to the point midway between death and rebirth; he also had a vision of the time immediately preceding the descent to Earth, and again to the point midway between death and rebirth. But something else happened as well. In that the pupil was led to intensify and deepen his consciousness of the experiences he had undergone, his soul was strengthened by the vision of pre-earthly and post-earthly life and of the perpetual dying and rebirth of Nature. Then with even stronger inner force and energy he was able to intensify his experience of the numbness and of being taken up into the Cosmos, as it were winging his way out into the blue Ether-distances; and again the experience was intensified of having felt himself to be a personality only in his senses, when he was unconscious of all the rest of his being, aware only of existence in the eye, in the whole tract of hearing or of feeling, and so on—when he was as it were nothing but sense-organ.

With strong inner efforts the pupil had learnt to intensify Iris experience of these conditions and then to face what was to lead to a further stage. When he had undergone the experiences I have described, he was exhorted to recapitulate the condition of inner numbness deliberately, with the result that he felt his own organism as a kind of mineral, as something quite foreign to him, and his soul as though it were merely hovering over and surrounding this mineral structure. Then, in the resulting state of consciousness, he had a clear vision of the Old Moon-existence preceding the Earth embodiment.

At this point you will remember how I have described this Old Moon-existence in the book Occult Science ^{1pp. 137-61 in the 1962/63 edition of Occult Science: an Outline.} and in numbers of lectures. What is there described came to life in the pupil’s consciousness and was actual reality to him. The Old Moon-existence appeared to him as a planetary body in a watery, fluid state—a state not similar to that of water as it is today, but gelatinous, congealed. He felt himself to be an organism within this semi-soft mass. And he felt the structure of the whole planet streaming out, as it were, from his own organism.

You must realise how greatly experiences at that time differed from those familiar today. Today we feel bounded by, enclosed within, our skin. To assert this is, of course, a tremendous error, for directly we consider the volume of air in a human being it is obviously nonsensical to feel enclosed within the skin. As I have often said, the air I now have inside me was, a short while ago, not inside but outside me and the air that will soon be inside me is at the moment outside. In respect of the air, therefore, we cannot rightly think of ourselves as cut off from the external world. We are wherever tire external air is present. Fundamentally speaking there is no difference if at one moment you have a piece of sugar in your mouth and the next moment it is in your stomach—for it has taken a certain path; the same is true if at one moment a certain volume of air is outside and the next moment is in your lungs. The piece of sugar goes one way, the air goes another, through the organs of respiration. And anyone who thinks otherwise should not maintain that his mouth is part of himself but insist that his body begins with his stomach! Therefore it is nonsense, even in this modern age, for a man to imagine himself enclosed within his skin.

During the Old Moon period it was utterly impossible to imagine any such limitation. Objects such as the pieces of furniture here which can be touched and taken hold of did not then exist; everything was a Nature-product. And when one stretched out the organ which can be compared in a certain respect with fingers today, this organ could be drawn in again and disappeared; the arm could be drawn in, one could make oneself thin, and so on. Today, if you touch the blackboard here you do not feel that it belongs to you; but at that time, you felt that whatever you touched actually belonged to you, in the sense that the inbreathed air is part of you today. So that one’s own structure was felt to be a part of the whole structure of the Old Moon planet.

All this came into the consciousness of the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries. He also had the impression that the gelatinous fluidity was a temporary condition of the Old Moon-existence, that there were certain epochs when in this gelatinous fluidity something appeared which, physically, was much harder than our solids today. It was not ‘mineral’ in the sense in which emerald, corundum or diamond are mineral today but it was hard and horny. There was no crystalline mineral substance as we ourselves know it but the forms taken by the horny, mineral-like substance were quite obviously the product of organic secretion, in the sense that we do not speak today of the crystalline structure of a cow’s horn, knowing that the horn can be where it is only because it has been projected from an organism; and the same is true of a deer’s antlers or similar formations. Fundamentally, the same is true of bones—but they are mineral. And so at the time of the Old Moon evolution a mineral-like substance was produced out of organic material.

The Beings who at that time had already passed through their human stage and who had only part of their fully human nature to complete during Earth-existence, are the Individualities of whom I have spoken as the great and wise primeval Teachers of humanity on the Earth and who now have their abode in the Moon-sphere.

All this became known to the pupil during the condition of frozen numbness. And when he had passed through these experiences in the way that satisfied his Initiators, it was impressed upon him that he must advance still further, to the stage where he could let his benumbed being stream out to the Ether-distances, to the point where he could feel: the paths to the Heights bring me out into the far distances of the blue Ether, to the very boundaries of Space.

And then, when this experience was repeated, the pupil felt that everything was in a certain way moving outwards towards the far distances of the Ether. But as he himself moved towards the Ether-distances, after the Heights had uplifted him and carried him thither, he felt as though at the very end of the world of space something penetrated into and vitalised him. It was what we today should call Astrality. It was an element that was experienced inwardly and at that time united with the human being far more forcefully than is the case today, although it could not then be experienced with equal intensity. It united with the human soul, but even more forcefully than, for example, a feeling that might arise within a man today if he were to expose himself to the instreaming, revivifying light of the Sun to the point where he becomes sensitively aware of each of His organs. By paying only a little attention you will be able to feel, if you expose yourself freely to the Sun, allowing it to stream through you but not to the point of inner discomfort—if you expose yourselves to the Sun in such a way that you let its instreaming light and warmth bring comfort to your body, then you will become aware of each organ much more vividly than before. You come unmistakably into a condition where you can describe the very make-up of your organism.

The fact that there is so little knowledge of such things today is due only to a lack in the capacity of modern man to be genuinely attentive. If this capacity were not lacking people would be able at least to give dreamlike indications of what is revealed to them in the instreaming sunlight. In earlier times, of course, the pupil was instructed about the inner constitution of the human organism quite differently from the methods current today. Corpses are now dissected and anatomical diagrams made. This does not require much attentiveness and it must be admitted that even this is not forthcoming from many students. But at all events, not much attention is required! Once upon a time the pupil of the Mysteries was taught by being exposed to the Sun and then trained to become sensitively aware of his inner constitution while reacting to the pleasant, instreaming sunlight; and after this experience he was well able to describe his liver, his stomach, and so on. This inner connection of man with the Macrocosm can become a reality provided only that the right conditions are established. It is quite possible to be blind and yet to feel the form of an object by touching it. And so too, when one of your organs is made sensitive to another by attentiveness to the effects of the light, you can describe such organs, at any rate so that at least you can have a shadowy picture of them in your consciousness.

At an advanced stage in the Hibernian Mysteries, when the pupil was transported as it were into the blue distances of the Ether, and when the Astral light streamed into him, his predominant experience was that he did not feel his own identity but he felt in his consciousness the existence of a great and mighty World—a World of which he said: I am living in an element together with other Beings; this element is pure, innate Nature-goodness. For out of this element in which I am swimming—forgive me for using an expression possible only in a much later terminology—out of this planetary element in which I am swimming like a fish in water although it consists of light, volatile components, I feel comfort streaming into me from every side.—The pupil felt the astral light pouring into him everywhere, forming him, building him. ‘This Element is pure Nature-goodness,’ he could have said, ‘for everywhere it bestows something upon me. I am surrounded by pure Goodness. Goodness is everywhere, but it is a Nature-goodness that envelops me. This Nature-goodness is also creative, for its forces enable me to exist, give me my form and sustain me as I hover and move in this Element.’—And so the impressions received were those of innate, Nature-born morality.

A modern comparison for this experience might be expressed as follows.—Suppose a person had a rose in front of him and in smelling its scent were able to say with inner sincerity: ‘Divine goodness spread through the whole Earth-planet is also streaming into this rose; and when the rose communicates its own essence to my organ of smell I become aware of that Divine goodness.’ Anyone saying this honestly and sincerely today would be experiencing something like a faint shadow of what in those ancient times was felt inwardly as the very life-element of the individual human being. And that, my dear friends, was the experience of the Old Sun-existence which preceded our Earth. Thus the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries could experience the Old Sun-existence and Old Moon-existence—the predecessors of the Earth.

And further, when the pupil had been led to be aware of himself in his senses only, had experienced something like a discarding of his whole organism, leaving nothing but the experiences of his senses so that he was living only in his eyes, in the auditory tract, in the whole range of his feeling, then he became aware of what I have called in the book Occult Science, the Saturn-existence—an existence ^{2pp. 115-28 in the 1962/63 edition.} where man lived in the element of warmth, hovering and moving among the differentiations of the warmth. He felt himself then not as a being of flesh and blood, not as having bones and nerves, but solely as an organism of warmth—the planetary warmth of Saturn; he was aware of warmth when the outer warmth differed in degree from the inner warmth. Weaving in warmth, living through warmth, a feeling of inner warmth in contact with outer warmth—such, in effect, was the Saturn-existence.

This was experienced by the pupil when his whole being seemed to be living in his senses. The senses themselves were not so highly differentiated as they are today. This awareness of warmth, this life in and through warmth was the all-important experience. But there were moments when the pupil, aware of himself as an organism of warmth, approached a different degree of warmth and felt something in himself like a burst of flames; he now seemed to be living in an element not merely of streaming, weaving and billowing warmth but at a certain moment he seemed to be aflame. There was also something like a sensation of taste, not taste as felt on the tongue, for naturally it could not have been so at that time, but taste which the pupil felt was kindled in him by contact with another being ... and so on. Thus the Saturn-existence became living reality in the pupil’s consciousness.

So you see that in these Hibernian Mysteries the pupil was actually led into the past of the Earth’s planetary existence. He came to know the Saturn-, Old Sun- and Old Moon-existence as the successive metamorphoses of the Earth.

Then he was also exhorted to recapitulate experience which guided him into his inner being and which I described to you as a feeling of inner oppression, as though the air inside him was densifying; the corresponding condition experienced by a man of today would be the feeling of incapacity to exhale, the feeling of the breath pressing from every side.

This was the first condition which the pupil had now to call up in his soul by exerting his own will. And when he did this, in the dreamlike state in which Nature was revealed to him in summer landscapes—when he had induced this condition, then suddenly, at a particular moment, he had a remarkable experience. In order to give you any idea at all of this experience I must describe it in the following way.—Imagine that as a human being living on the Earth you come into a warm room. You feel the warmth; then you go outside where the temperature is perhaps several degrees below zero and you feel the cold intensely. You feel the difference between warmth and cold, but it is a bodily experience, having little or no connection with your life of soul. And as an earthly human being you certainly do not feel when you come into a warm room that it is filled with something around you like a great Spirit is enveloping you with love. This warmth is comforting to the body but you do not feel that it is of the nature of soul. In the same way you shiver in the cold, you feel cold in your body, but you have no feeling that out there, on account of the prevailing climatic conditions, demons are approaching you, bringing such bitter frost that your very soul feels cold. Physical warmth is not at the same time an experience of your soul because as an earthly man you do not, in your ordinary-level consciousness, feel the element of soul with any intensity. An earthly man can feel warmed by the friendship or love of another; he can feel chilled by his coldness, perhaps also by his philistinism, and that is understood to be a quality of the soul. But just think how little a man of today, when he goes out in the summer into the warm atmosphere is prone to say: Now the Gods arc loving me! Or how little he is prone to say when he goes out into the wintry cold: Now only diose Sylphs who arc the pedants in their world are flying through the air.—Such expressions arc never heard at the present time!

This awareness which I have tried to characterise from another side was something that came naturally to the pupil after he had experienced the feeling of oppression. He felt warmth as a physical quality and simultaneously as a quality of soul, and this was possible because his consciousness was projected into the Jupiter-existence that will follow the Earth. For we shall become Jupiter-men in that we unite physical warmth with soul-warmth. As Jupiter-men, in caressing another person or a child lovingly we shall at the same time actually transmit warmth; love and outstreaming warmth will not be separate as is now the case. A man will be able to pour warmth into his surroundings as a quality of soul as well.

The pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries was brought to the point of experiencing this—not, of course, in the physical world but while he was transported to another world—and thus the Jupiter-existence was revealed to him, not in physical reality but in a picture.

The next intensification of consciousness was that the pupil was to feel deeply the inner need of which I spoke yesterday, for he now realised the stern necessity to overcome his own ‘I’ which would otherwise become the source of evil. When he had brought about this inner mood of soul, something arose in his consciousness with the result that he not only felt soul-warmth and physical warmth as a unity but this unity began to shine. The secret of the radiance of soul-light dawned upon him and thereby he was transported into that future time when the Earth will be metamorphosed into the Venus embodiment.

And when the pupil felt all that he had hitherto experienced streaming together in his heart, as I described yesterday, everything that his soul had experienced was revealed to him as being at the same time the experience of the whole planet. The picture that arose in the pupil was this.—Man has a thought; this thought does not remain inside his skin but begins to sound', the thought becomes Word. What man thinks forms itself into Word. The Word expands throughout the Vulcan-planet. Everything in the Vulcan-planet is articulate, living reality. Word resounds to Word; Word is clarified by Word; Word speaks to Word; Word learns to comprehend Word. Man feels himself to be the World-comprehending Word, as the Word which comprehends the Cosmic Word. When this experience arose as a picture before the candidate for the Hibernian Initiation he knew himself to be transported to the Vulcan-existence, the last metamorphosis of the Earth-planet.

It will be clear to you that the Hibernian Mysteries belong to what Spiritual Science calls the Great Mysteries. For the Initiation achieved by the pupils gave them a vista of man’s pre-earthly and post-earthly life. At the same time it gave them a vista of the cosmic life with which man is interwoven and out of which he is born in the course of the ages. Thus the pupil learnt to know the Microcosm, that is to say, himself as a being of spirit, soul and body in relation to the Macrocosm. But he also learnt to know how the Macrocosm itself evolves, how it arises, undergoes metamorphoses and ultimately passes away. The Hibernian Mysteries were verily the Great Mysteries.

They were in their prime during the era preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. But the essential feature of the Great Mysteries was that in them the Christ of the Future was spoken of, just as men spoke later on of the Christ as One was connected with events already past. And when, after the first Initiation the image of Christ had been shown to the pupil as he was leaving the Temple, the purpose was to bring home to him that the whole evolutionary course of the Earth in cosmic existence is orientated to the Event of Golgotha which at that time lay in the future.

On the island which later endured so many sore trials there was a centre of the Great Mysteries, a centre of ‘Christian’ Mysteries before the Event of Golgotha—a centre where the spiritual gaze of human beings living before the Mystery of Golgotha was directed in the right and true way towards it.

And when eventually that Mystery actually happened, when in Palestine those remarkable occurrences took place which we describe when speaking of Christ Jesus on Golgotha and of His environment—at that very time solemn Festivals were celebrated within the Hibernian Mysteries themselves and the community associated with them, that is to say by people who belonged in some way to the Mysteries. And what was actually happening in Palestine was revealed in Hibernia in pictures that were not memories of anything in the past. On the island of Hibernia men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha in pictures, simultaneously with the historical occurrence in Palestine. And when, later on, the Mystery of Golgotha was presented in pictures in the various temples and churches and was experienced in this way by the people, the pictures were reminders of something that already belonged to the past and was therefore an historical fact which ordinary consciousness could recollect. But these pictures were seen on the island of Hibernia at a time when they could not have been memories of past history but were a direct revelation from the spiritual world. The events that took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era and were visible there to physical eyes, were beheld spiritually in Hibernia. Men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha in the spirit. And this was the basis of the greatness inherent in everything that subsequently went out from Hibernia into the rest of the civilised world but disappeared as time went on.

I beg you now to pay attention to the following.—Anyone who studies purely external history can find much that is splendid and beautiful, much that is uplifting and enlightening when he looks back to the ancient East or to ancient Greece or Rome. Again, he can learn many things when he comes, let us say, to the time of Charles the Great and on through the Middle Ages. But just think how scanty the historical accounts become in the period which begins a few centuries after the birth of Christianity and ends approximately in the ninth or tenth centuries of the Christian era. If you examine the records that exist, in all the earlier and more honest historical works you will find only very few and very meagre accounts of events in these centuries. It is only after that period that records begin to be more detailed.

Admittedly, later historians feel a certain professional shame at having to deal with the available material so unsatisfactorily. They cannot describe matters of which they have no knowledge and so they think out all kinds of fantastic interpretations which are inserted into the history of these centuries. But it is all so much nonsense. If external history is presented honestly, accounts of the period during which the downfall of Rome took place are very meagre, and the same applies to the migrations of the peoples— which as a matter of fact were outwardly not nearly so striking as people today suppose but were striking only because of their contrast with the previous and subsequent periods of tranquillity. If you were to calculate quite simply today—or rather, if you had calculated in the pre-War period—how many people let us say, leave Russia for Switzerland every year, you would find that the numbers would be greater than they were during the time of the migrations over the same area of Europe. All these things are relative. So that if one were to continue talking in the style adopted when trying to describe the migrations of the people, one would have to say that up to the beginning of the War, migrations were taking place all over Europe and also across to America. And the emigrations to America were more numerous than the streams of folk-migrations. But this is not realised.

It is nevertheless a fact that records of the period described as that of the folk-migrations and their aftermath are very scanty. Little is known about what was actually happening; little is said, for example, about what was going on in this neighbourhood, or in France, or in Germany. But it was precisely in these regions that faint echoes of what had been revealed in the Hibernian Mysteries streamed over Europe; it was here that the effects and impulses of the Great Mysteries of Hibernia penetrated into civilisation, even if only in faint echoes.

But then two great streams met. What I am now saying must not be taken as casting even the faintest shade of sympathy or antipathy upon anything, but merely to describe the historical fact. Two streams met. The one that came over from the East by way of Greece and Rome reckoned with the increasingly prevalent faculty connected with intellect and the senses and worked on the basis of historical remembrance of outwardly visible, outwardly experienced events. From Palestine, through Greece and Rome, came the tidings which spread abroad and were received by men into their religious life—the tidings of something that had taken place in Palestine in the physical world through Christ, the God.

These tidings were accessible to man’s faculty of understanding which was now entirely dependent upon what we know today as the ordinary-level consciousness, based upon reason and the senses. The tidings spread far and wide and finally superseded what came over from Hibernia, from the West, and as a last echo of the ancient, instinctive wisdom took account of the fact that the traditional wisdom of humanity was now shedding its light into a new kind of consciousness. From Hibernia there spread across Europe an impulse which in the matter of spiritual illumination did not depend upon physical vision or upon ‘proof’ based upon evidence of any actual historical event. This impulse spread in the form of cult, in the form of Hibernian cult and wisdom. It was concerned with illumination that comes to man from the spiritual world, even in the case of an event which, like the Mystery of Golgotha, had taken place simultaneously in physical reality in another part of the world. In Hibernia, the physical reality of the event in Palestine was seen spiritually.

But the mentality that could grasp only physical reality overshadowed the impulse which relied upon the spiritual upliftment, the spiritual deepening and enrichment of man’s life of soul. And gradually, because of an inevitable necessity of which we have spoken in other connections, the impulse connected exclusively with physical existence gained the upper hand over the impulse connected with purely spiritual vision. The tidings of the Redeemer who had been present in a physical body on the Earth obscured the wonderful Imaginations that came over from Hibernia and could be presented in cult and ritual—these tidings gained the upper hand over the majestic Imaginations which portrayed the Redeemer as a spiritual Being and took no account, either in the corresponding rituals or descriptions, of the fact that what had come to pass was also an historical event. Still less could this aspect have been taken into account before the actual event, for the cults had been instituted in the pre-Christian era.

So the time drew on when men became immune to everything that was not physically perceptible, when they came to the point of no longer accepting as truth anything that was not physically perceptible. Hence the substance of the wisdom that came over from Hibernia was no longer understood; nor was the art which came from there felt to be an expression of cosmic truth. The consequence was the ever-increasing growth of a science which was not a Hibernian science but one concerned only with what the senses perceive, and also of a form of art which was not Hibernian art but one—including even the art of Raphael—using sense-perceptible objects as models, whereas Hibernian art set out to give a direct presentation of spiritual reality itself.

And so the time came when a certain darkness fell over the spiritual life, when men sought only to develop reason and the life of the senses, and founded philosophies which were intended to show that in some way or other the senses were able to discover the secret of Being, or actually to reach Truth.

Finally there came the remarkable phase when human consciousness was no longer accessible to spiritual influences. And where can one see this more precisely than in what was given to humanity in a work such as The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz ^{3A translation in English by Carlo Pietzner is contained in the volume entitled A Christian Rosenkreuz Anthology, compiled and edited by Paul M. Allen. (Rudolf Steiner Publications, Blauvelt, New York.) Andreae’s work appeared in the year 1616.} I have written about it recently in the journal Das Reich. I called attention there to the strange circumstances connected with this work. Valentin Andreae was the physical author; he wrote it down immediately before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. But nobody who has read the biography of Valentin Andreae will believe for a moment that the man who afterwards became a pedantic cleric and wrote several unctuous treatises, was the real author. Just compare the Chymical Wedding, or The Organisation of the World, or certain other writings of Valentin Andreae—he was naturally the same physical personality—with the sanctimonious stuff written by Pastor Valentin Andreae in his later life. It is a really remarkable phenomenon. Here is a youth, hardly out of school, writing works such as The Organisation of the World or The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, and we have to make strenuous efforts to find any meaning in them at all. The young writer himself understood nothing of their real content as he showed in his later life, for he became a sanctimonious, unctuous parson. And yet it is the same man!

This fact alone makes it reasonable to state, as I did in my article, that the Chymical Wedding was not written in the ordinary sense by a human being, or at least only in the sense in which, for instance, Napoleon’s ever nervous, undercover secretary wrote his letters for him. But after all, Napoleon was a man who stood firmly on the ground, who was a very physical personality. The one who wrote the Chymical Wedding was not a physical personality and he simply made use of his ‘secretary’ who subsequently became the unctuous Pastor Valentin Andreae.

Picture to yourselves this extraordinary occurrence immediately preceding the Thirty Years’ War. A young man lends his hand to a spiritual Being who writes down, through him, a work such as the Chymical Wedding! This was only a specially striking example of what was often wont to happen in those days but was not recognised or preserved. Something of great importance for humanity at that time was given in such a way that the intellect was incapable of grasping it. The onward flowing spirituality was still revealing itself but men were no longer capable of experiencing it within themselves.

And so it is the case that in regard to this period, in history books—however voluminous they might be—there would inevitably be many blank pages, for men were living at that time in two currents: the one current was taking its course in the physical world below, where people were becoming more and more prone to believe only in what their reason and their senses told them; but above there was an onflowing spiritual revelation which could be announced through human beings but which they could not themselves experience. And one of the most characteristic examples of this spiritual revelation is a work such as The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz.

What was revealed passed through men’s heads even though it was not understood; it passed through men’s heads, became weaker and also distorted. Magnificent, truly poetical material degenerated into the kind of gibberish of which verses in the Chymical Wedding are sometimes examples. And yet they are revelations of something truly great: imposing, macrocosmic pictures, majestic experiences. If with the vision that is possible today we read the Chymical Wedding, we learn to understand its imagery. The meaning of the pictures becomes evident. They are coloured by the brain through which they have passed but glorious realities are apparent behind them.

Such things are a proof that what humanity once experienced had lived on in the subconscious. In the earlier period of the devastating Thirty Years’ War, it had all been dissipated. Then, in the first half of the seventeenth century there was an inflow of what had once been glorious spiritual truth. The Mystics alone preserved its impress in their souls, but the real substance, the spiritual substance, was lost. Reason began to conquer, and to prepare the epoch of freedom.

And today we look back at these things and find our gaze directed to the Hibernian Mysteries with an intensified activity of soul, for they are, fundamentally speaking, the last of the Great Mysteries, the last Great Mysteries through which the secrets of human and cosmic life could be revealed. Today, when we penetrate into them again, the Hibernian Mysteries are revealed in all their grandeur, but our vision cannot really penetrate into their depths if we have not first fathomed them by dint of our own, independent efforts. And even when this has been achieved, a strange thing happens. When one approaches the pictures of the Hibernian Mysteries in the Akashic Record, one feels that something is repelling one. It is as though one were being held back by some force, as though the soul could not pierce its way through. The nearer one approaches, the darker the goal becomes and a kind of stupefaction comes upon the soul. One has to work one’s way through this stupefaction and the only possibility of doing so is to rekindle one’s own, independently acquired knowledge of similar matters. And then one understands why it is so difficult to approach the Hibernian Mysteries. It becomes evident that they were the final echo of an age-old gift to humanity from the divine-spiritual Powers, but that when these Mysteries withdrew into a shadowy existence they were at the same time surrounded by an impenetrable wall, so that a man cannot fathom or have vision of them if he maintains a passive attitude of soul; he can approach these Mysteries only by kindling spiritual activity, in other words when he has become a modern man in the true sense. Access to the Hibernian Mysteries was closed in order to make it impossible for men to draw near them in the old way; they were to be compelled to experience with the full activity of consciousness that which must be discovered inwardly in this age of freedom. Neither by a scrutiny of history nor by clairvoyant vision of ancient, great and wonderful secrets can these Mysteries be discovered, but only by the exercise of a man’s own inner, conscious activity.

The Great Mysteries of Hibernia thus provide the very strongest indication of the fact that a new Age begins at the time when they faded into the land of shadows. But they can be seen again today in all their glory and majesty by a soul sustained by inner freedom; for through true inner activity they can indeed be approached and the menace of stupefaction overcome. The soul has nevertheless to confront obstacles standing before the revelations that were once accessible to those who were to be initiated— revelations of the ancient secrets of the spiritual wisdom, instinctive it is true, but none the less sublime, which once poured over men on the Earth as a primeval power of the soul. The most beautiful and significant memorials in later time to the primeval wisdom of men, to the grace of divine-spiritual Beings manifesting in the earliest stage of human life on Earth, the most beautiful tokens of that Age are the pictures which can be revealed to us when we direct our spiritual gaze to the Mysteries of Hibernia.