The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

induced from without, by word and ritual, and sacred actions, of whose deep effect Steiner has spoken in connection with the Hibernian Mysteries. It is dangerous to speculate on such things, but if the “box’ of the Eleusinian Mysteries was experienced as a tomb like the chest of Osiris—soma sema said the Greek proverb, the body is a tomb—then the action of removing, working with and replacing (something) at a high ritual moment may well have induced an experience of great significance.

The experience of death is essentially that of breaking through a

limiting force, of overcoming a boundary. In Initiation boundaries are overcome in the same way as in death. But it is these very boundaries that give us support and confidence in our waking life. The removal of them must therefore be accompanied by an element of fear or terror, which the Initiate has always to overcome. Some knowledge of this necessary overcoming of fear remains in Aristotle’s definition of the function of Tragedy as the ‘grouping around a hero successive deeds calculated to arouse in the beholder feelings of fear and compassion, in order that a purification may take place in his soul’.

Steiner himself has described the overcoming of these boundaries in a modern initiation in a course of lectures entitled Mysteries of the East and of Christianity. Normally, he says, our percepts represent the boundaries of our consciousness. Our cyes rest on the blue of the sky, the green of the grass, the red of the rose. Or we perceive our own thoughts (for thoughts also we can regard as percepts). as our ultimate inner experience. Initiation is the development of an intensified perception by which the blue of the sky, the green of the grass, the red of the rose or the perceived thought vanish as objects, and become windows through which to see the spiritual forces which create and sustain them. At that moment the solidity and the separateness attached to all earthly experience vanishes, and the initiate knows the terror of a world taken from under his feet. It is a necessary prelude to spiritual experience, but through it comes that union of macrocosm and microcosm, of self and world, which is another ‘note’ of Mystery Wisdom.

Steiner not only developed the idea of such a union in a spatial sense in a number of scientific fields—for instance the ‘correspondence’ of the earth with the human organism, of the planets with the life organs, of the fixed stars with the brain—but he also

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