The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

spiritual beings—both good and bad. The intellect separates: it looks at the ‘objective’ world and says: I am not that. It is therefore relatively innocuous as far as morality is concerned. Spiritual consciousness unites, and it may unite with cither the good or the bad elements in the spiritual world.

A second ‘note’ of Mystery Wisdom is that it assumed a correspondence—and a potential identification—between macrocosm and microcosm. In Egypt the Pharaoh became Ra or Osiris; as indeed was finally held to be the case with all souls after death. In Greece the four elements in man ‘correspond’ to the same four elements outside him. The ‘correspondences’ between stars and planets, the kingdoms of nature, the social structure, and the physiology of man were an essential of medieval lore, and are still taken for granted even in the plays of Shakespeare. Ours is the first civilization which has assumed that man can know the world without knowing himself. The adjuration of the Delphic oracle was not only Know Thyself, but Know thyself and thou wilt understand the world.

All this has been lost today. Man is no longer at the centre of creation but has become an accidental speck on a fortuitous and relatively minute planet in a solar system which is one of millions scattered through the infinitude of space. But in describing his own development during the first years of the century, when the new scientific outlook was at its most assured, Steiner (himself scientific by training and temperament) could write:—

“Man as a microcosmic entity who carries within him all the rest of earthly creation, and who has become a microcosm by throwing off all the rest—this was for me a revelation which I attained only during the early years of the century.”

Here already is a theme—essential to Mystery Wisdomwhich Steiner was later to develop into a new account of evolution in the light of the ‘records of the rocks’, of which he was a keen student, as befitted a young friend of the great Haeckel. The new evolutionary scientist studied the development of organic forms in their physical remains. But for Steiner it was obvious that form is not essentially a physical phenomenon. Even a single man changes his physical substance pretty well entirely every seven years—yet he keeps his characteristic form. If we consider man as spiritual form, then we can interpret the record of the rocks as revealing a premature, and therefore

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