The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

distorted, physicalisation of the human form in a condition of the earth not yet ready for the incarnation of the individualised spiritual being—man. It is a highly complicated process, deeply affected by the shattering event known in different ways to nearly all ancient tradition and called in the Hebrew-Christian version the Fall. But it meets all the discovered facts, and enables a modern mind to find its way back into the old understanding of man as a microcosm—‘in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon? of animals’.

This relationship between Man and the World is one of the keys which Steiner puts in our hands for opening the secret of the old Mysteries. If we may again refer to the Mysteries of Eleusis for the sake of greater concentration, we find that there has been and still is, great difficulty in interpreting the myth which is basic to this Mystery—the rape of Persephone (known only as Kore—the maiden—at Eleusis) by Hades. In the early days of Anthropology it was naturally taken as a fertility mythKore being the corn which reappears every spring. But to closer thought difficulties appear. If Demeter is Mother Earth (as the original derivation of the name seemed to assure) surely it is Demeter who receives the corn into her bosom in the winter? Yet the myth tells us that it was then that she lost Kore. Then came Sir James Frazer with the happy solution that Demeter represents the old corn and Persephone the new. But to still more penetrating minds it occurred that it is the old corn and not the new which is sown into the earth. So another solution had to be found. It was well known that harvest rites were often accompanied by the sacrifice of a pig which was thrown into a pit. So to the mind of another anthropologist the problem was solved by the happy idea that Persephone was originally the sacrificial pig. But we cannot, alas, rest even with this brilliant solution. For it is now known that in the earliest versions of the story there was no corn until after the whole event of the rape was over, when Demeter gave to Triptolemus the gift of corn as a reward. (Perhaps the most beautiful stele excavated at Eleusis shows Triptolemus between Demeter and Kore receiving the gift of corn.) It therefore seems difficult to know how precisely to

3 Paragon (sub.) = pattern of excellence: (verb) to set forth a perfect model. —Oxford Dictionary.

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