The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

intellectual mind. This is something on which Steiner insisted against the prevalent view that thinking was born as a new creation of the Ionian philosophers. Steiner held that it was not so much a creation as a translation, or metamorphosis, of the quite different experience of the Mysteries. He pointed to the fact that Heraclitus laid his book ‘Concerning Nature’ on the altar of Artemis at Ephesus. He even said that the categories of Aristotle were a translation into intellectual terms of ‘zodiacal’ experiences in the different Mystery Schools. That the ‘individualising’ intellect, though a different force from the ‘atoning’ picture consciousness, yet stems from it—this is also portrayed in the mythology of the Greeks. For Dionysus, the individualising God at whose altar the Greek drama was born and performed, was descended from Demeter and Persephone. It is a difficult story, with many variants and involving two manifestations or avatars of the God, but there is-no doubt that the ‘fair young god’ whom the Athenians hailed under the name Iacchos, and whom they carried in procession from Athens to Eleusis, was experienced as none other than Dionysus. Perhaps we may see in the procession a picture of the new consciousness being carried back to the fields from which it sprang, and where the mother was still to be found—and to be known.

A third ‘note’ of the Mysteries is that the experience is generally described as resembling the experience of death, or even of being identical with it. Thus Apuleius writes—again of the Mystery of Eleusis—in the second century after Christ:—‘I drew nigh to the confines of death, I trod the threshold of Persephone and returned to earth again.’

Plutarch testifies in the same strain:—‘At the moment of death the soul experiences the same impression as those who are initiated into the Great Mysteries.’

It has been observed that the present century has witnessed a remarkable change of tabus. The unmentionable subject in polite society used to be sex. The last fortress in this field has now fallen, but—as though man cannot live without a tabu—the subject of death has now taken its place. Christians are indeed allowed to believe in immortality, but they may not talk about what happens to the soul after death. This is the domain of cranks.

In contrast to this present attitude, Steiner’s ‘wisdom of-myan is full of a perpetual interplay between the realms of dgat