The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

life or to use more exact descriptions, life in the spiritual world, and life on the earth. Herodotus tells us that it was the Egyptians who first proclaimed their belief in reincarnation, but among the Greeks it is to be found in the Myth of Er which concludes Plato’s Republic, and there is no doubt it was part of the experience of the Mysteries. Intellectually Steiner approached the subject of reincarnation by a variety of roads. For him the experience of time—real time, not clock time—was essentially an experience of rhythm. No man has ever been more sensitive to the rhythmical processes of life—the systole and diastole of breath and heart beat, the alternation of waking and sleeping, the rhythm of the seasons, the seven year rhythm which dominates the life of man—all these were for him not merely organic processes but—though little noticed today, except in the case of sleeping and waking—deeply connected also with human consciousness. With these rhythms it is somewhat the same as with the scale of sound—there are sounds too high and too low for the ordinary ear to perceive, they transcend the normal stretch of consciousness. Similarly the greatest human rhythmlife in the spiritual world and life on earth in rhythmic alternation —lies beyond the normal consciousness. But man can feel his way to it by the deepened experience of other rhythms.

Another approach which Steiner makes is by way of that sense for ‘spiritual form’ which has already been discussed. The ‘form’ of man even as species is in reality spiritual not physical. But man is not merely ‘species’ like the animal: he is individual, and every biography of every individual has its own ‘time form’, which is no less real than a form made manifest in space. It was here that Steiner carried the idea of evolution further than his contemporaries were willing to go. Every form, he pointed out, can only evolve from an anterior form. Even the human form evolved (though in Steiner’s view not altogether in the way generally accepted) from earlier and less perfect forms. Similarly the form of the individual—the way his capacities play themselves out in life, his connections with other individuals, in short his biography must have evolved from a previous ‘form’—that is from another life on earth. Of course such thinking about, or better meditating on, rhythm and form is only the prelude to a real experience which it may awaken. In modern Mystery Wisdom it must be attained by inner effort. In the ancient Mysteries it could be

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