============================= Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity By Rudolf Steiner CONTENTS Preface to the Second Edition 1. - Points of View 2. - The Mysteries and their Wisdom 3. - The Greek Sages before Plato in the Light of Mystery Wisdom 4. - Plato as a Mystic 5. - The Wisdom of the Mysteries and Myth 6. - Egyptian Mystery Wisdom 7. - The Gospels 8. - The Lazarus Miracle 9. - The Apocalypse of John 10. - Jesus and his Historical Background 11. - The Nature of Christianity 12. - Christianity and Pagan Wisdom 13. - Augustine and the Church Notes by the Author ============================= PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Christianity as Mystical Fact was the title chosen by the author for this book when, eight years ago, he gathered into it the substance of lectures he had given in 1902. Its title was meant to indicate its character. The attempt was made, not merely to represent historically the mystical content of Christianity, but to describe the origin of Christianity from the standpoint of mystical contemplation. Underlying this intention was the thought that at the genesis of Christianity mystical facts were at work which can be perceived only through such contemplation. Only the book itself can make clear that by "mystical" its author does not imply a conception which relies more on vague feelings than on "strictly scientific statements". It is true that "mysticism" is at present widely understood in the former sense, and hence it is declared by many to be a realm of the human soul-life with which "true science" can have nothing to do. In this book the word "mysticism" is used to connote a spiritual fact which can be recognized in its true nature only when the knowledge of it is derived from the sources of spiritual life itself. If the kind of knowledge drawn from such sources is rejected, the reader will not be in a position to form any judgment of the book's contents. Only someone who allows that the same clearness may exist in mysticism as in a true presentation of the facts of natural science will be ready to admit that the content of Christianity as mysticism may also be mystically described. For it is not a question only of the contents of the book, but first and foremost of the methods of knowledge from which its contents derive. Many people today have a most violent dislike for such methods; they regard them as hostile to the true scientific spirit. And this holds not merely for those who allow validity only to an interpretation of the world which is founded on what they call "genuine scientific knowledge", but also for those who as believers wish to study the nature of Christianity. The author of this book stands on the ground of a conception which sees that the achievements of natural science in our age must lead on into true mysticism. Indeed, any other attitude towards knowledge contradicts everything presented by the achievements of natural science. The facts of natural science itself cannot be comprehended by means of those methods of knowledge which so many people would like to employ to the exclusion of all others, in the belief that they are thus standing on the firm ground of natural science. Only those who are able to agree that a full appreciation of our admirable modern knowledge of nature is compatible with genuine mysticism-they alone will not turn away from this book. The author's intention is to show, by means of what is here called "mystical knowledge", how the ground from which Christianity arose was prepared in the Mysteries of pre-Christian times. In this pre-Christian mysticism we find the soil in which Christianity throve as a seed of independent type. This point of view makes it possible to understand Christianity in its independent being, even though its evolution from pre-Christian mysticism is traced. If this point of view is overlooked, it is very possible to suppose that Christianity was merely a further development of preChristian mysticism. Many people of the present day have fallen into this error; they compare the content of Christianity with pre-Christian conceptions and are thus led to believe that Christian ideas were only a continuation of the former. The following pages are meant to show that Christianity presupposes the earlier mysticism, just as a seed presupposes the soil. It is intended to emphasize that knowledge of how Christianity emerged can bring out, rather than extinguish, its essential character. It is with deep satisfaction that the author is able to mention that this account of the nature of Christianity has found acceptance with a writer who has enriched the culture of our time in the deepest sense through his works on the spiritual life of mankind. Edouard Schure, author of Les Grands Initiis was so far in accord with the outlook of this book that he undertook to translate it into French under the title, Le Mystere Chretien et les Mysteres Antiques. It may be mentioned in passing, and only as a symptom of the existence at the present time of a longing to understand the nature of Christianity as presented in this book, that the first edition was translated into other European languages besides French. In preparing this second edition the author has not found occasion to alter anything essential, but some passages in the first edition have been expanded, and an endeavour has been made to express many things more exactly and in greater detail than was then possible. Unfortunately the author was obliged by stress of work to let a long period elapse between the time when the first edition was exhausted and the appearance of the second. RUDOLF STEINER May, 1910 ============================= I - Points of View Natural Science has deeply influenced modern thought. It is becoming more and more impossible to speak of spiritual needs and the life of the soul without taking the achievements and methods of science into account. Certainly, many people satisfy their spiritual needs without letting the influence of science disturb them. But those who feel the pulse-beat of the age cannot do that. Ideas derived from natural science take possession of our brains with increasing rapidity and, unwillingly though it may be, our hearts follow, often in dejection and dismay. It is not a question only of the number of people who are thus won over, but of the fact that in scientific thinking there is a force which convinces the attentive observer that here is something which a modern conception of the universe must reckon with. Many of its outgrowths call for justified rejection. But merely to reject them is not enough in an age when many people turn to this way of thinking and are drawn to it as though by a magical power. The case is in no way altered because a few people see that trite science long ago passed, by its own initiative, beyond the shallow doctrines of force and matter taught by materialists. It would seem much more important to pay heed to those who boldly declare that the ideas of natural science must form the basis of a new religion. If these ideas appear shallow and superficial to anyone who understands the deeper spiritual concerns of humanity, he must nevertheless take note of them, for it is these ideas that are gaining attention today, and there is good reason to think they will claim more and more attention in the near future. Another class of people must also be taken into account, those whose hearts have lagged behind their heads. With their reason they cannot but accept the ideas of natural science. They are impressed by the weight of evidence. But these ideas cannot satisfy the religious needs of their soulsthe perspective offered is too dreary. Is the human soul to rise on the wings of enthusiasm to the heights of beauty, truth and goodness, only for each individual to be swept away in the end like a bubble blown by the material brain? This is a feeling which oppresses many minds like a nightmare. Therefore scientific concepts oppress them also, coming as they do with the potent force of authority behind them. As long as they can, these people remain blind to the discord in their souls. Indeed, they console themselves by saying that perfect clarity in these matters is denied to the human soul. They think in accordance with natural science so long as the, experience of their senses and the logic of their intellect demand it, but they keep to the religious sentiments in which they have been brought up, and prefer to remain in darkness as to these matters-a darkness which clouds their understanding. They have not the courage to battle through to the light. There can be no doubt that the scientific way of thinking is the greatest force in modern intellectual life, and must not be heedlessly ignored by anyone concerned with the spiritual interests of humanity. But there is equally no doubt that the way in which it sets about satisfying spiritual needs is superficial and shallow. If this were the right way, the outlook would indeed be comfortless. Would it not be depressing to be obliged to agree with those who say "Thought is a form of force. We walk by means of the same force with which we think. Man is an organism which transforms various forms of force into thought-force, an organism whose activity we maintain by what we call `food', and with which we produce what we call `thought'. What a marvellous chemical process it is which can change a certain quantity of food into the divine tragedy of Hamlet." This is quoted from a pamphlet by Robert G. Ingersoll, called Modern Twilight of the Gods. Thoughts of this kind, put forward by someone or other, may seem to gain little general acceptance; but that makes no difference. The point is that innumerable people find themselves compelled by the system of natural science to see the world in this light, even when they think they are not doing so. It would certainly be a dreary outlook if natural science itself compelled us to accept the creed proclaimed by many of its modern prophets. Most dreary of all for anyone who has gained, from the content of natural science, the conviction that in its own sphere its mode of thought holds good and its methods are unassailable. For he is driven to say to himself: However much people may dispute about particular questions, though volume after volume may be written, and thousands of observations accumulated about the meaningless character of the "struggle for existence", or about the omnipotence or powerlessness of natural selection, science itself is moving in a direction which, within certain limits, must find acceptance to an ever-increasing degree. But are the demands made by natural science really such as they are said to be by some of its representatives? The fact that they are not is proved by the behaviour of these representatives themselves. In their own work they by no means follow the so-called scientific procedure that is often demanded of work in other spheres. Would Darwin and Ernest Haeckel have ever made their great discoveries about the evolution of life if, instead of observing life and the structure of living beings, they had shut themselves up in a laboratory and made chemical experiments on pieces of tissue cut out of an organism? Would Lyell have been able to describe the development of the crust of the earth if, instead of studying strata and their contents, lie had examined the chemical qualities of innumerable rocks? Let us really follow in the footsteps of these investigators who tower like giants in the domain of modern science. We shall then apply to the higher regions of spiritual life the methods they have used in the study of nature. We shall not then believe we have understood the nature of the "divine" tragedy of Hamlet by saying that a wonderful chemical process transformed a certain quantity of food into this tragedy. We shall believe it as little as an investigator of nature could seriously believe that he has understood the function of heat in the evolution of the earth when he had studied the action of heat on sulphur in a retort. Neither does he attempt to understand the construction of the human brain by examining the effect of liquid potash on a fragment of it, but rather by enquiring how, in the course of evolution, the brain has been developed out of the organs of lower organisms. It is therefore quite true that anyone who is investigating the nature of spirit can do no better than learn from natural science. He need only do as science does, but he must not allow himself to be misled by what individual representatives of natural science would dictate to him. He must investigate in the spiritual as they do in the physical domain, but he need not adopt the opinions they entertain about the spiritual world, confused as they are by their exclusive observation of physical phenomena. We shall be acting in the spirit of natural science only if we study the spiritual development of man as impartially as the naturalist observes the sense-world. We shall then certainly be led, in the domain of spiritual life, to a kind of contemplation which differs from that of the naturalist as geology differs from pure physics and biology from chemistry. We shall be led on to higher methods, which cannot, it is true, be those of natural science, though they are quite conformable with its spirit. By this means we are able to correct from another standpoint any one-sided views connected with scientific research, but in so doing we are simply carrying natural science further; we are not betraying it. These methods alone are able to bring us to the heart of spiritual developments such as that of Christianity or of other world religions. Anyone applying these methods may arouse the opposition of many who believe they are thinking scientifically, but he will himself know that he is acting in full accord with a genuinely scientific method of thought. An investigator on these lines must go beyond merely historical examination of the documents relating to spiritual life. This is necessary precisely because of the attitude of mind he has acquired from studying natural phenomena. For the expounding of a chemical law it is of small use to describe the retorts, dishes, and pincers which have led to the discovery of the law. And it is just as useless, when expounding the origin of Christianity, to ascertain the historical sources drawn upon by the Evangelist St. Luke, or those from which the Revelation of St. John was compiled. History in this case can be only the outer court to research proper. It is not by tracing the historical origin of documents that we shall discover anything about the dominant ideas in the writings of Moses or in the traditions of the Greek mystics. The documents are only the outer expression for the ideas. Nor does a scientist who is investigating the nature of man trouble about the origin of the word "man", or the way in which it has developed in a language. He keeps to the thing, not to the word in which it finds expression. And in studying spiritual life we must likewise abide by the spirit, and not by outer documents. ============================= 2 - The Mysteries and Their Wisdom Something like a mysterious veil hangs over the way in which ancient civilizations provided for the spiritual needs of those who sought a deeper religious life and knowledge than the popular religions could offer. If we inquire how these needs were met, we are led into the obscurity of enigmatic cults, and the individual seeker whose needs they satisfy is hidden for a time from our view. We see how it is that the popular religions cannot give him what his heart desires. He acknowledges the existence of the gods, but knows that the ordinary ideas about them do not solve the great problems of existence. The wisdom he desires is carefully guarded by a community of priest-sages. His aspiring soul seeks a refuge in this community. If lie is found by the sages to be sufficiently prepared, they lead him up by stages, in ways hidden from outer observation, to higher knowledge. What then happens to him is not disclosed to the uninitiated. For a time he seems to be entirely removed from earthly life and transported into a hidden world. When he reappears in the light of day, a different, quite transformed person stands before us. We see a man who cannot find words sublime enough to express the momentous experience through which he has passed. Not merely metaphorically, but in a most real sense, he seems to have ,gone through the gate of death and to have awakened to a new and higher life. And he is certain that no one who has not had a similar experience can understand his words. This is what happened to those who were initiated into the Mysteries, into that secret wisdom, withheld from the people, which threw light on the greatest questions. This hidden religion of the elect existed side by side with the popular religion. Its origin vanishes, as far as history is concerned, into the obscurity which surrounds the origin of nations. We find this secret religion everywhere among the ancients, as far as our knowledge goes; and we hear their sages speak of` the Mysteries with the greatest reverence. What was it that they concealed? And what did they unveil to the initiate? All this becomes still more enigmatic when we discover that the ancients looked upon the Mysteries as something dangerous. The way leading to the secrets of existence passed through a world of terrors, and woe to him who tried to gain them unworthily. There was no greater crime than the "betrayal" of secrets to the uninitiated. The "traitor" was punished with death and the confiscation of his property. We know that the poet Aeschylus was accused of having reproduced on the stage something from the Mysteries. He was able to escape death only by fleeing to the altar of Dionysos and by legally proving that he had never been initiated. What the ancients say about these secrets is significant, but at the same time ambiguous. The initiate is convinced that it would be a sin to tell what he knows and also that it would be sinful for the uninitiated to listen. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated, and compares their state of mind to preparation for death. A special mode of life had to precede initiation, designed to give the spirit mastery over the senses. fasting, solitude, mortifications, and certain exercises for the soul were the means employed. The things to which man clings in ordinary life were to lose all value to him. The whole trend of his life of sensation and feeling was to be changed. There can be no doubt as to the meaning of such exercises and tests. The wisdom which was to be offered to the candidate for initiation could produce the right effect on his soul only if he had previously transformed his lower life of the senses. He was led into the life of the spirit. He was to behold a higher world, but he could find no relationship to that world without previous exercises and tests. Everything depended on that relationship. In order to think correctly about these matters, it is necessary to have experience of the intimate facts concerning the life of knowledge. We must come to see that there are two widely divergent attitudes towards the fruits of the highest knowledge. The surrounding world is at first the real one for us. We feel, hear and see what goes on in it, and because we thus perceive things with our senses, we call them real. And we reflect about events, in order to get an insight into their connections. On the other hand, that which wells up in our soul is at first not real to us in the same sense. It consists "merely" of thoughts and ideas. At the most we see in them only images of reality, for we cannot touch, see, or hear them. There is another way of relating ourselves to the world. A person who clings to the kind of reality described above will hardly understand it, but it comes to certain people at some moment in their lives, and their whole connection with the world is completely reversed. They then call truly real the images which well up in the spiritual life of their souls, and they assign only a lower kind of reality to what the senses hear, touch and see. They know they cannot prove what they say, that they can only relate their new experiences; and they know that when speaking of them to other people they are in the position of a man with normal eyesight who describes his visual impressions to one born blind. They venture to impart their inner experiences, trusting that there are others around them whose spiritual eyes, though as yet closed, may be opened by the power of what they hear. For they have faith in humanity and want to give it spiritual sight. They can only lay before it the fruits which their spirit has gathered. Whether another sees them depends on whether he has understanding for what a spiritual eye discerns. There is something in man which at first prevents him from seeing with the eyes of the spirit. To begin with, lie is not cut out for that. He is what his senses make him, and his intellect is only the interpreter and judge of them. The senses would fulfil their mission poorly if they did not insist upon the truth and infallibility of their evidence. An eye would be a bad eye if from its own point of view it did not assert the unconditional reality of its perceptions. The eye is right as far as it goes, and is not deprived of its due by the eye of the spirit. The latter only allows us to see the things of sense in a higher light. Nothing seen by the eye of sense is denied, but a new brightness radiates from what is seen. And then we know that what we first saw was only a lower reality. We see it still, but we see it immersed in something higher, which is spirit. It is now a question of whether we realize and feel what we see. One who lives only in the sensations and feelings of the senses will look upon impressions of higher things as a Fata Morgana, or a mere play of fancy. His feelings are entirely directed towards the things of sense. He grasps emptiness when he tries to lay hold of spirit forms. They withdraw from him when he gropes after them. They are "mere" thoughts. He thinks them, but does not live in them. They are images, less real to him than fleeting dreams. Rising up like bubbles they vanish away in face of the massive, solidly built reality of which his senses tell him. It is otherwise with one whose perceptions and feelings with regard to reality have changed. For him, that solid reality has lost its absolute stability and value. His senses and feelings need not become numbed, but they begin to be doubtful of their absolute authority. They leave room for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate the space left open to it. At this point a possibility which can be terrible comes in. A man may cease to respond to immediate reality without finding any new reality opening up before him. He feels as if suspended in the void, as if he were dead. The old values have disappeared and no new ones have arisen in their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. This, moreover, is by no means a mere possibility. It happens at some time or other to everyone who is seeking for higher knowledge. He comes to a point at which the spirit makes life appear as death. He is then no longer in the world, but cinder it-in the nether-world. He is passing through Hades. Well for him if he sink not! Happy if a new world opens up before him! Either he dwindles away or he appears to himself transfigured. In the latter case he beholds a new sun and a new earth. The whole world has been born again for him out of spiritual fire. It is thus that the initiates describe the effect of the Mysteries upon them. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to be taken to Hades and brought back again by the successors of Zarathustra. He says that during his wanderings he swam across the great water, and passed through fire and ice. We hear that the mystics were terrified by a flashing sword, and that from it "blood" flowed. We understand this when we know from experience the point of transition from lower to higher knowledge. We then feel as if all solid matter and things of sense had dissolved into water, and as if the ground were cut away from under our feet. Everything we had felt to be living has died. The spirit has passed through the life of the senses, as a sword pierces a warm body; we have seen the blood of sense-nature flow. But a new life has appeared. We have risen from the nether-world. The orator Aristides says: "I thought I touched the god and felt him draw near, and I was then between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light that no one who is not initiated can speak of or understand it." This new existenee is not subject to the laws of lower life. Growth and decay no longer touch it. Much can be said about the Eternal, but any words spoken of it by one who has not been through Hades are "mere sound and smoke". The initiates have a new conception of life and death. Now for the first time they feel they have the right to speak about immortality. They know that anyone who speaks of it without having been initiated talks of something he does not understand. He will attribute immortality only to something which is subject to the laws of growth and decay. The mystics, however, do not desire merely to gain the conviction that the kernel of life is eternal. From the standpoint of the Mysteries such a conviction would be valueless, for the initiates hold that in non-mystics the Eternal is not present as a living reality. If a non-mystic spoke of the Eternal, he would be speaking of nothing. It is rather the Eternal itself that the mystics are seeking. They have first to awaken the Eternal within them; then they can speak of it. Hence they accept the full truth of Plato's hard saying, that the uninitiated sinks into the mire, and that only one who has passed through the mystical life enters eternity. It is only in this sense that the words in a fragment of Sophocles can be understood: "Thrice-blessed are the initiated who come to the realm of the shades. They alone have life there. For others there is only misery and hardship." Are we therefore not describing dangers when speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not robbing a man of happiness and of the best part of his life to take him to the portals of the nether-world? Terrible is the responsibility incurred by such an act. And yet ought we to refuse that responsibility? These were the questions the initiate had to put to himself. He believed that his knowledge bore the same relation to the souls of the people as light does to darkness. But innocent happiness dwells in that darkness, and the mystics held that this happiness should not be wantonly interfered with. For what would have happened in the first place if the mystic had betrayed his secret? He would have uttered words and only words. His hearer would have lacked the perceptions and feelings which could have evoked the spirit from the words. For that, a hearer would have had to go through all the stages of preparation, exercises and tests, leading to a complete change in his sense-life. Without this, he would have been hurled into emptiness and nothingness. He would have been deprived of his own happiness without receiving anything in exchange. It might indeed be said that one could have taken nothing from him, for mere words would certainly not change his experience of life. He would still have been able to feel and experience reality only through his senses. Nothing but a fearful, life-destroying surmise would have been given him; and that could be construed only as a crime. The wisdom of the Mysteries is like a hothouse plant which must be cultivated and fostered in seclusion. Anyone who brings it into the atmosphere of everyday ideas gives it an air in which it cannot flourish. Faced with the caustic verdict of modern science and logic, it withers away to nothing. Let us therefore divest ourselves for a time of the education we gained through the microscope and telescope and the habits of thought derived from natural science, and let us cleanse our clumsy hands, which have been too busy with dissecting and experimenting, in order that we may enter the pure temple of the Mysteries. For this, a truly unbiased attitude is necessary. The important point for the mystic is first of all the frame of mind in which he approaches the heights where answers to the riddles of existence can be experienced. Especially in our day, when crude physical science is regarded as the only source of real knowledge, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the keynote of the soul. Knowledge then becomes an intimate personal concern; and for the mystic that is what it really is. Tell someone the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it him readymade! The mystic will consider it nothing but empty sound ii' the person does not come to meet it in the right way. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the right feeling is not there to kindle the essential fire. A divine Being approaches you! It is either everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind which you bring to everyday matters. Everything, if you are prepared for the meeting and attuned to it. What the divine Being is in itself is a matter which does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it leaves you as it found you or makes another man of you. But this depends entirely on yourself. You must have been prepared by a special education, by a development of the inmost forces of your personality, for responding to what a divine Being is able to kindle and release in you. What is brought to you depends on how you receive it. Plutarch has told us about this education, and of the greeting which the mystic offers to the divine Being approaching him: ".For the god, as it were, greets each one who approaches him with the words, `Know thyself', which is certainly of no less import than the ordinary greeting, `Hail'. We in turn reply to the god, 'Thou art', and thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only fitting greeting is to declare that he is. In that form of being we really have no part here, for every mortal creature, situated between birth and passing away, manifests merely an appearance, a feeble and uncertain image of itself. If we try to grasp it with our understanding, it is as when water is tightly compressed and leaks out under the pressure, spoiling its surroundings. For the intellect, seeking to form an all-too-clear conception of things that are subject to accidents and change, is bewildered by their arising and passing away and is unable to apprehend anything lasting or truly existing. For, as Heraclitus says, we cannot swim twice in the same stream, neither can we lay hold of a mortal being twice in the same state, for through its swift and sudden changes it is dispersed and recomposed; it arises and passes away; it comes and goes. Therefore, that which is subject to becoming can never attain true being, for becoming never ceases or stands still. Change begins in the germ and forms an embryo; then there appears a child, a youth, a man, an old man; the early and successive ages are continually annulled by the ensuing ones. Hence it is ridiculous to fear one death, when we have already died in so many ways and are still dying. For, as' Heraclitus says, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death of air the birth of water, but the same process of change may be seen still more plainly in man. The strong roan dies when he becomes old, the youth when he becomes a man, the boy on becoming a youth, and the child on becoming a boy. What existed yesterday dies today; what is here today will die tomorrow. No person endures or is a unity; we become many persons, even as matter flows .round one image, one common form. For if we were always the same how could we take pleasure in things which formerly did not please us, how could we love and hate, admire and blame opposite things, how could we speak differently and give ourselves up to different passions, unless we were endowed with a different shape and appearance, and with different intentions? For no one can come into a different state without change, and one who is changed is no longer the same; but if he is not the same, he no longer exists and is changed from what he was, becoming something else. Because we have no knowledge of true being, sense-perception has led us astray into taking appearance for reality.* Plutarch speaks of himself as an initiate. What he port rays here is an essential requirement for the life of a mystic. Such a man acquires wisdom which enables his Spirit to see through the illusory character of sense-life. What the senses regard as real existence is plunged into the stream of becoming; and in this respect man is subject to the same conditions as are all other things in the world. Before the eyes of his spirit he himself dissolves; the sum-total of his being is broken up into parts, into fleeting phenomena. -------- Notes: (*) From Plutarch's Moralia, "On the E at Delphi". ------- Birth and death lose their distinctive meanings; they become moments of appearing and disappearing, like all other happenings in the world. The Highest cannot be found in connection with development and decay. It can be sought only in what is truly abiding, in that which looks back over the past and forward into the future. Finding that which looks backwards and forwards is a stage of higher knowledge. This abiding element is the spirit, which manifests itself in and through the senseperceptible world. It has nothing to do with change and becoming; it does not arise and pass away as do all senseperceptible appearances. Anyone who lives entirely in the world of sense has the spirit latent within him; anyone who has pierced through the illusion of the world of sense has the spirit within him as a manifest reality. Anyone who attains to this insight has developed a new inner principle. Something has happened within him as when a plant adds a coloured flower to its green leaves. The forces causing the flower to grow were always latent in the plant, but they became manifest only when the blossom appeared. Divine, spiritual forces are latent in a man who lives merely through his senses, but they become a manifest reality only in the initiate. Such is the transformation which takes place in the mystic. By his inner development he has added a new element to the world. The world of sense made him a human being endowed with senses, and then left him to himsclf. Nature had thus fulfilled her mission. What she is able to do with the forces operative in man is exhausted; but not so the forces themselves. They lie as though spellbound in the merely natural man and await their release. They cannot release themselves. They fade away to nothing unless man lays hold of them and develops them; unless he calls into actual existence what is latent within him. Nature evolves front the imperfect to the perfect. She leads beings through a long series of stages, from inanimate matter, through all living forms up to physical man. Man looks around and sees himself as a physically real being, subject to change, but he also perceives within him the forces from which the physical reality arose. These forces are not part of the process of change, for they have given birth to the changing world. They are within man as a sign that lie has more life within him than his senses perceive. What can come from them belongs to the future. He feels something flash up within him which created everything, including himself, and he feels that this will inspire him to higher creative activity. This something is within him; it existed before his manifestation in the flesh, and will exist afterwards By means of it he was born, but he can lay hold of it and take part in its creative activity. Such are the feelings that inspired the ancient mystic after initiation. He felt the Eternal and Divine. His doing was to become a part of that divine creative activity. He could say to himself: "I have discovered a higher ego within me, but this ego extends beyond the bounds of my sense-existence. It existed before my birth and will exist after my death. This ego has created from all eternity; it will go on creating through all eternity. My physical personality is a creation of this ego. But it has incorporated me within it; it works creatively within me, I am part of it. What I henceforth create will be higher than the physical. My personality is only a means for this creative power, for this divine element within me." Thus did the mystic experience his birth into the Divine. The mystic called the power that flashed up within him leis daimon. He was himself a product of this daimon. It seemed to him as though another being had entered him and taken possession of his organs, a being standing between ]'is physical personality and the all-ruling cosmic power, the Godhead. 'The mystic sought this being-leis daimon. He said to himself: "I have become a human being in great Nature, but Nature did not complete her task. This completion I must take in hand myself. But I cannot accomplish it in the gross realm of nature to which my physical personality belongs. All that can be developed in this realm is already developed. Therefore I must leave this realm. I must build further in the realm of the spirit at the point where nature left off. I must create for myself a life-sustaining atmosphere not to be found in outer nature. This atmosphere was prepared for the mystic in the Mhsy temples. There the forces slumbering within him were awakened; there lie was changed into a higher, creative spirit-nature. This transformation was a delicate process. It could not bear the untempered atmosphere of everyday life. But when it was completed, the initiate stood as a rock, rooted in the Eternal and able to defy all storms. But it was impossible for him to reveal his experiences to anyone unprepared to receive them. Plutarch says that in the Mysteries the best indications concerning the true nature of the daimons were to be found. And Cicero tells us that from the Mysteries, "when they are explained and traced back to their meaning, we learn the nature of things rather than that of the gods".* From such statements we see clearly that for the mystics there were higher revelations about the nature of things than anything popular religion could impart. Indeed we see that the daimons--i.e., spiritual beings-and the gods themselves, needed explaining. Therefore beings of a higher nature than daimons or gods were approached, and this belonged to the essence of the wisdom of the Mysteries. The people pictured the gods and daimons in images borrowed from the world of the senses. Would not anyone who had penetrated into the nature of the Eternal come to doubt the eternal nature of such gods as these? How could the Zeus of popular imagination be eternal if he had the ------------- Notes: (*) Plutarch, On the Decline of the Oracles; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods. ------------- characteristics of a perishable being? One thing was clear to the mystics: man's conception of the gods is arrived at differently from his conception of other things. An object belonging to the outer world compels us to form a very definite idea of it. By contrast, we form our ideas about the gods in a freer, even arbitrary manner. The control of the outer world is absent. Reflection teaches us that the concepts we form of gods are not subject to outer control. This leaves its in logical uncertainty; we begin to feel that we ourselves are the creators of our gods. Indeed, we ask ourselves how we have arrived at a conception of the universe that goes beyond physical reality. The initiate was obliged to ask himself such questions: and his doubts were justified. "Look at all representations of the gods", he might think to himself. "Are they not like the beings we meet in the world of sense? Did not man create them for himself, by giving or withholding from them some characteristics belonging to beings of the sense-world? The savage lover of the chase creates a heaven in which the gods themselves take hart in glorious hunting, and the Greek peopled his Olympus with divine beings whose models were taken from his own surroundings." The philosopher Xenophanes (575-480 B.C.) drew attention with crude logic to this fact. We know that the older Greek philosophers were entirely dependent on the wisdom of the Mysteries. We will presently show this in detail, beginning with Heraclitus. What Xenophanes says may at once be taken as the conviction of a mystic. It runs thus: "Men who picture the gods as modelled on their own human forms, give them human senses, voices and bodies. But if cattle and lions had hands, and knew how to use them 11, painting and working, they would paint the forms of the gods and shape their bodies in the likeness of their own bodies. Horses would snake gods in horse-form, and cattle would make gods like bulls." Through insights of this kind, man may begin to doubt the existence of anything divine. He may reject all mythology, and recognize as reality only what is forced upon him by his sense-perception. But the mystic did not become a doubter of this kind. He saw that the doubter would be like a plant which said: "My crimson flowers are vain and worthless, for I am complete with my green leaves. Anything I may add to them would - e merely adding illusory appearance." Just as little could the mystic rest content with the gods of the people. If the plant could think, it would understand that the forces which created its green leaves are also destined to create coloured flowers, and it would not rest until it had investigated those forces and come face to face with them. This was the attitude of the mystic towards the gods of the people. He did not deny them, or say they were illusion; but he knew they had been created by man. The same natural forces, the same divine element, which work creatively in nature are at work in the mystic. They create within him images of the gods. He wishes to see the force that creates the gods; it comes from a higher source than these gods. Xenophanes alludes to it thus: "One God is supreme among all gods and men. His form is not like that of mortals; his thoughts are not their thoughts." This God was also the God of the Mysteries. He could be called a "hidden God", for nowhere-the candidate was told-can he be found through the senses only. Look at outer things around you-you will find nothing divine. Exert your reason; you may be able to detect the laws by which things arise and pass away, but even your reason will not show you anything divine. Saturate your imagination with religious feeling, and you may be able to create images which you may take to be gods, but your reason will pull them to pieces, for it will prove to you that you created them yourself, having borrowed the material from the sense-world. So long as you look at outer things simply as a reasoning being, you must deny the existence of God; for God is hidden from the senses, and from that reason of yours which explains sense-perceptions. God lies spellbound in the world and you need His own power to find Him. You must awaken that power in yourself. These are the teachings that were given to the candidate for initiation. And now began for him the great cosmic drama in which his life was engulfed. The action of the drama meant nothing less than the deliverance of the spellbound God. Where is God? This was the question asked by the soul of the mystic. God is not existence, but nature exists. And in nature He must be discovered. There . lie has found an enchanted grave. It was in a higher sense that the mystic understood the words, "God is love". For God has exalted that love to its climax; He has sacrificed Himself in infinite love; He has poured Himself out, dismembered Himself in the manifold things of nature. Things in nature live and He does not live in them. He rests in them. He lives in men. And man can experience the life of God in himself. If he is to come to knowledge of God he must release this knowledge creatively in himself. The candidate now looks into himself. As latent creative power, not yet released into existence, the Divine is living in his soul. In the soul is a sacred place where the spellbound Divinity may be set free. The soul is the mother who is able to conceive the Divine by the action of nature. If the soul allows herself to be impregnated by nature, she will give birth to the Divine. Out of the marriage of the soul with nature the Divine is born-no longer a "hidden", but a manifest Divinity. It has life, a perceptible life, and walks among men. It is the spirit in man released from enchantment, the offspring of the spellbound Divine. This is not the great God, who was and is and is to come, yet he may be taken, in a certain sense, as a revelation of Him. The Father remains at rest in the unseen; the Son is born to man out of his own soul, Mystical knowledge is thus an actual event in the cosmic process. It is the birth of the Divine. It is an event as real as any natural event, only enacted upon a higher plane. The great secret of the mystic is that he himself creatively releases the offspring of the divine in himself, but he first prepares himself to recognize it. The uninitiated man has no experience of the Father of this offspring, for the Father slumbers under a spell. The Son appears to be born of a virgin, the soul having seemingly given birth to him without impregnation. All her other children are conceived by the sense-world. Their father can be seen and touched, for he has a material existence. The divine offspring alone is begotten of the eternal, hidden Father-God Himself. ============================= 3 - The Greek Sages Before Plato in the Light of Mystery Wisdom Numerous facts combine to show that the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks rested on the same convictions as mystical knowledge does. We understand the great philosophers only when we approach them with feelings gained through study of the Mysteries. With what veneration does Plato speak in the Phaedo of the "secret teachings". "It appears," he says, "that those who established the Mysteries fir us were not unenlightened; for a long time they have been enjoining upon us that anyone who reaches the underworld without having been initiated and sanctioned falls into the mire; but that he who arrives there purified and (-onsecrated will dwell with the gods. For those who have to (1,) with the Mysteries say that there are many thyrsus bearers, but few truly inspired. These latter are, in my opinion, none other than those who have devoted themselves in the right way of wisdom. I myself have not I "elected the task of becoming one of them, as far as I was able, but have striven after this in every way." It is only a man who places his search for wisdom entirely the service of the condition of soul created by initiation who could speak thus of the Mysteries. And there is no doubt that a flood of light is shed on the words of the great Greek philosophers when they are illuminated from the Mysteries. The relation of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 B.C.) to the 'Mysteries is plainly indicated in a traditional saying about him-that his thoughts "were an impassable road"; anyone coming upon them without being initiated found only "disease and darkness', but they were "brighter than the sun" for anyone introduced to them by a mystic. And when it is said of his book that he deposited it in the temple of Artemis, this means that initiates alone could understand him. Heraclitus was called "The Obscure", because it was only through the Mysteries that light could be thrown on his views.* Heraclitus comes before us as a man who took life with the utmost earnestness. We see plainly from his characteristics, if we know how to reconstruct them, that he bore within him intimate knowledge which lie knew that words could only indicate, not express. Out of such temper of mind arose his celebrated utterance, "All things flow away", which Plutarch explains thus: "No one can dip twice in the same stream, or touch twice the same mortal being. For they are all in flow, dispersed and gathered together, suddenly and swiftly, and not so much at different times as simultaneously, a perpetual gathering and releasing, coming and going." A man who thinks in this way has seen through the nature of transitory things, for he has felt compelled to characterize the essence of transitoriness itself in the clearest terms. Such a description could not be given unless the transistory were being measured by the eternal, and in particular it could not be extended to man without having seen into his inner nature. Heraclitus has indeed extended his characterization to men. "Life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and age are the same; this changes into that, and that again into this." These words show full knowledge of the illusory nature of the lower personality. He says still more forcibly, "Life and death are found in our living, even as in our dying". What does this mean but that if we value ----------------- Notes: * Edmund Pfleiderer has collected the historical evidence for the relation of Heraclitus to the Mysteries. cp. his book, Die Philosophie des Heraklit ven Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee. Berlin, 1886. ----------------- life more than death, we are under the spell of the transitory? Dying is to perish, in order to make way for new life, but the eternal is living in the new life as in the old. The same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When we grasp this eternal, we look upon life and death with the same feeling. Life has a special value only when we have not been able to awaken the eternal within us. The saying, "All things flow away", might be repeated a thousand times, but unless said with this feeling it is an empty sound. The knowledge of eternal becoming is valueless if it fails to lift us out of our attachment to the transistory. A turning away from that thirst for life which binds us to the transistory is indicated by Heraclitus when he says, "How can we say about our daily life, `we are', when from the standpoint of the eternal we know that `we are and are not''?" (cf. Fragments of Heraclitus, No. 8r). "Hades and Dionysos are one and the same", another Fragment says. Dionysos, the god of joy in life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysiac festivals were dedicated, is, for Heraclitus, the same as Hades, the god of destruction and annihilation. Only one who sees death in life and life in death, and in both the eternal, high above life and death, can view the merits and demerits of existence in the right light. Then even imperfections become justified, for in them t-) lives the eternal. What they are from the standpoint of the limited lower life, they are only in appearance: "It is i1-t always best for men to have their wishes gratified. Illness makes health sweet and good; hunger makes food appreciated toil, rest. The sea contains the purest and ',',purest water. Drinkable and wholesome for fishes, it is undrinkable and injurious for human beings." Here Heraclitus is not drawing attention primarily to the transitoriness of earthly things, but to the splendour and majesty of the eternal. Heraclitus speaks vehemently against Homer and Hesoid, and the learned men of his day. He wished to show up their way of thinking, which remains bound to the transistory only. He did not want gods endowed with qualities taken from a perishable world, and he could not regard as the highest form of science one that investigates the becoming and passing away of things. For him, the eternal speaks out of the perishable, and for this eternal he has a profound symbol. "The harmony of the world arises from opposites held in tension, as in the lyre and the bow." What depths are hidden in this image! By the harmonizing of divergent forces, unity is attained. One tone contradicts another, yet together they produce harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world, we have the thought of Heraclitus: "The immortal is mortal; the mortal, immortal; death is immortal life for mortals; for immortals, mortal life is death." A primal fault for man is to fix his cognition on the transitory. Thereby he turns away from the eternal, and life becomes a danger for him. Whatever happens to him comes through life, but these happenings lose their sting if he ceases to set absolute value on life. His innocence is then restored. It is as though he were able to return from the so-called seriousness of life to his childhood. An adult takes seriously much that for a child is merely play, but anyone who attains to real knowledge becomes like a child. "Serious" values lose their value, looked at from the standpoint of eternity. Life then seems like play. On this account Heraclitus says: "Eternity is a child at play; it is the reign of a child." Where does the original fault lie? In taking with the utmost seriousness much that does not deserve to be so taken. God has poured Himself into the universe of things. If we make use of these things with no reference to God, we are treating them quite seriously as "the tombs of God". We should play with them like a child, and should devote our earnestness to awakening the Divine element which sleeps spellbound within them. Contemplation of the eternal acts like a destroying fire on ordinary assumptions about the nature of things. The spirit dissolves thoughts of sensuality; it consumes them. That is the higher meaning of the Heraclitean thought that fire is tile primary element of all things. This thought is certainly to be taken first as an ordinary physical explanation of the phenomena of the universe. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think of him in the same way that Philo, living in the early days of Christianity, thought of the laws of the Bible. "There are people," he says, "who take the written laws merely as symbols of spiritual teaching; they dilligently search for the latter, but despise the laws themselves. I can only blame such people, for they should pay heed both to discerning the hidden meaning and to observing tae obvious one." If we argue whether Heraclitus meant I w "fire" physical fire, or whether fire for him was only a symbol of eternal spirit which dissolves and reconstitutes all things, that is putting a wrong construction upon his thought. He meant both, and yet neither. For spirit was also alive, for him, in ordinary fire, and the force which is physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in the human soul, which melts in its crucible mere sense-knowledge, so that out of this the contemplation of the eternal may arise. It is very easy to misunderstand Heraclitus. He makes strife the "Father of things", but only of "things", not of the eternal. If there were no contradictions in the world, if the "lost multifarious interests were not in conflict with one another, the world of becoming, of transitory things, would trot exist. But what is revealed in this antagonism, what is diffused in it, is not strife but harmony. Just because there is strife in all things, the spirit of the wise should pass over them like a breath of fire, and change them into harmony. At this point there shines forth one of the great thoughts o l Heraclitean wisdom. What is man as a personal being? from the above point of view Heraclitus derives the answer. Man is composed of the conflicting elements into which divinity has poured itself. In this state he finds himself, and beyond it he becomes aware of the spirit within him-the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. But the spirit is born, for man, out of the conflict of elements, and it has itself to calm them. In man, Nature surpasses herself. The same universal force which created antagonism and the mixture of elements has afterwards to do away with the conflict through its wisdom. Here we arrive at the eternal dualism which lives in man, the perpetual antagonism between the temporal and the eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite particular, and out of this he has to create something higher. He is both dependent and independent. He can participate in the eternal Spirit he contemplates only in proportion to the compound of elements which the eternal Spirit has brought about within him. And it is just on this account that he is called upon to fashion the eternal out of the temporal. The spirit works within him, but in a special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of the human soul that something temporal should be able to work and gain strength like something eternal. That is why the soul is akin both to a god and to a worm. Man, because of this, stands between God and animals. The dynamic force within him is his daimonic element; the element which strives out beyond himself. In a striking phrase-"Man's daimon is his destiny"-Heraclitus refers to this fact. "Daimon" is here meant in the Greek sense. In modern language one would say "spirit". The personality is the vehicle of the daimonic element. This element is not confined within the limits of the personality, and for it the birth and death of the personality are of no significance. What is the relation of the daimonic element to the personality which comes and goes? The personality is only a form of appearance for the daimon. Anyone who has arrived at this knowledge looks beyond himself, backwards and forwards. His experience of the daimonic within himself testifies to his own immortality. And he can no longer limit his daimon to the one function of, filling out his personality, for his personality can be no more than one of the forms in which the daimon is manifest. The daimon cannot limit himself to one personality; he has power to animate many. He is able to move from one personality into another. The great thought of reincarnation springs as a matter of course from the Heraclitean premises, acid not only the thought but the experience of the fact. The ,;,ought only paves the way for the experience. Anyone who becomes conscious of the daimonic element in himself does not find it to be a new-born innocent. He finds that it has characteristics. Whence do they come? Why have I certain natural aptitudes? Because other personalities have already worked upon my daimon. And what becomes of the work which I accomplish in the daimon if I am not to assume that it, task ends with my own personality? I am working for a future personality. Between me and the cosmic unity something interposes which reaches beyond me, but is yet not the same as divinity. This something is my daimon. My today is only the outcome of yesterday, my tomorrow will be the outcome of today; in the same way my life is the outcome of a former life and will be the foundation of a future one. Just as mortal man looks back to innumerable yesterdays and forward to many tomorrows, so does the soul of the sage look upon many lives in his past and many in the future. The thoughts and aptitudes I acquired yesterday I am using today. Is it not the same with life? Do not people come to the horizon of existence with the most diverse capacities? Whence this difference? Does it proceed from nothing? Natural science takes much credit for having banished miracle from our view of organic life. David Frederick Strauss, in his Die alte and die neue Glaube, considers it a great achievement that we no longer think of a complete organic being as a miracle created from nothing. We understand its perfection when we are able to explain it as a development front imperfection. The structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors to have been primitive fishes which have been gradually transformed. Let us at least agree to accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit what seems to us to be right in the domain of nature. Is the perfected spirit to have the same preconditions as the imperfect one? Does a Goethe have the same antecedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents of an ape are as unlike those of a fish as the antecedents of Goethe's mind are unlike those of a savage. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe's soul is different from that of the savage soul. The soul has grown as well as the body. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe is richer than that of a savage. Let us take the doctrine of reincarnation in this sense, and we shall no longer find it unscientific. We shall be able to explain in the right way what we find in our souls, and we shall not take what we find as if created by a miracle. If I can write, it is because I learned to write. No one who has a pen in his hand for the first time can sit down and write. But if someone has come into the world with "the stamp of genius", must he owe it to a miracle? No, even the "stamp of genius" must be acquired. It must have been learned. And when it appears in a person, we call it a spiritual element. But this element had first to learn; it will have acquired in a former life the talent it shows in a later one. In this form, and in this form only, did the thought of eternity pass before the mind of Heraclitus and other Greek sages. They never spoke of a continuance of the immediate personality after death. Compare some verses of Empedocles (490-430 B.C.). He says of those who accept the data of experience as miracles Foolish and ignorant they, and do not reach far with their thinking, Who suppose that what has not existed can come into being, Or that something may die away wholly and vanish completely; Impossible that any beginning can come from Not-Being, Impossible also that being can fade into nothing; For wherever a being is driven, it will there continue to be. Never will any believe, who have been in these matters instructed, That spirits of men live only as long as so-called life endures, That only so long do they live, receiving their joys and their sorrows, Or that ere they were born and when they are dead, they are nothing. The Greek sage did not even raise the question whether there was an eternal part in man, but asked only in what this (,tonal element consisted and how man can nourish and cherish it in himself. For it was clear to him from the outset t ! 1 at man is an intermediate creation between the earthly and the divine. It was not a question of the divine outside and beyond the world. The divine lives in man, but in a human way. It is the force urging man to make himself ever more and more divine. Only one who thinks in this way can say with Empedocles: When, set free from the body, you rise up into the free aether, You became an immortal God, having escaped from death. What may be done for a human life from this point of view? It may be initiated into the encircling order of the eternal. For in man there must be forces which merely natural life does not develop. And his life might pass away unused if the forces remained idle. To unlock them, and so to make man akin to the divine-that was the task of the Mysteries. And this was also the mission which the Greek sages set before themselves. In this way we can understand Plato's saying, that "he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the underworld will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods". We have to do here with a conception which treats the significance of immortality as being closely bound up with the Universe. Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the eternal within him, he does in order to enhance the value of the world's existence. The knowledge he gains does not make him an idle spectator of the universe, forming images for himself of what would be there just as much if he did not exist. The force of his cognition is a higher, creative force of nature. What flashes up within him spiritually is something divine which was previously under a spell; without his cognition it would have lain idle, waiting for another deliverance. Thus a human personality does not live in and for itself, but for the world. Life when looked at in this way extends far beyond individual existence. In this light we can understand utterances such as that of Pindar, giving a vista of the eternal: "Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries before descending under the hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows the beginning promised by Zeus." We can understand also the proud traits and solitary nature of sages such as Heraclitus. They were able to say of themselves that much had been revealed to them, for they did not attribute their knowledge to their transitory personality, but to the eternal daimon within them. Their pride was of necessity stamped with humility and modesty, expressed in the words, "All knowledge of perishable things is in perpetual flux, like the things themselves". Heraclitus calls the eternal universe a game; he could also call it the most serious of realities. But the word "serious" has been worn out by being applied to earthly experiences. On the other hand, a realization of "the play of the eternal" gives man a security in life which he cannot have if he takes transitory things too seriously. A conception of the universe different from that of Heraclitus grew up, on the ground of the Mysteries, in the community founded by Pythagoras during the sixth century B.C. in Southern Italy. The Pythagoreans saw the basis of things in the numbers and geometrical figures whose laws they investigated by means of mathematics. Aristotle says o l' them: "They were the first to advance the study of ;mathematics and were so engrossed in it that they took the elements of mathematics to be the elements of all things. `:ow as numbers are naturally the first thing in mathematics, and they thought they saw many resemblances in numbers to things and processes, and certainly more in ,lumbers than in fire, earth, and water. So, for them, one type of number came to mean justice; another, the soul and spirit; another, time, and so on with all the rest. Moreover they found in numbers the characteristics and relations of' harmony; and so everything else, in accordance with its whole nature, seemed to be a reflection of numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first thing in n azure. The mathematical and scientific study of natural phenomena must always lead to a certain Pythagorean habit of thought. When a string of a certain length is struck, a particular note is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numerical proportions, other notes will be produced. The pitch of the notes can be expressed in nurnbers. Physics also expresses colour-relations in figures. When two bodies combine into one substance, it always happens that a certain definite quantity of one of them, pressible in numbers, combines with a certain definite :amity of the other. The Pythagoreans studied these derings of measures and numbers in nature. Geometrical figures play a similar role. Astronomy, for instance, is athematics applied to the heavenly bodies. One fact, above all, impressed the Pythagoreans. This is that man, quite alone and purely through his mental ti\'itY, discovers the laws of numbers and figures, and yet, when he looks abroad into nature, he finds that things are obeying the same laws which he has ascertained for himself in his own mind. Man forms the idea of an ellipse and ascertains the laws of ellipses; and the heavenly bodies move according to the laws he has established. (It is not, of course, a question here of the astronomical views of the Pythagoreans. Anything that may be said of these can equally be said of Copernican views in our present context.) Hence it follows directly that the achievements of the human soul are not an activity apart from the rest of the world, but that in them cosmic laws are expressed. The Pythagoreans said: The senses show us physical phenomena, but not the harmonious order they obey. The human mind must first find these rules of harmony within itself, if it wishes to behold them in the outer world. The deeper meaning of the world, that which bears sway within it as an eternal, law-abiding necessity-this makes its appearance in the human soul and becomes a present reality there. The meaning of the world is revealed in the soul. This meaning is not to be found in what we see, hear, and touch, but in what the soul brings to light from its own depths. The eternal laws are thus hidden in the depths of the soul. If we descend there, we shall find the Eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the Cosmos, is in the human soul. The soul-element is not confined to the bodily substance enclosed within the skin, for in the soul are born the laws by which worlds circle in celestial space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality serves only as the organ through which the order which pervades cosmic space may express itself. There is something of the spirit of Pythagoras in a saying by one of the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa: "We are told that human nature is small and limited, and that God is infinite, and it is asked how the finite can embrace the infinite. But who dares to say that the infinity of the Godhead is limited by the boundary of the flesh, as though by a vessel? For not even during our lifetime is the spiritual nature confined within the boundaries of' the flesh. The material body, it is true, is limited by neighbouring parts, but the soul reaches out freely into the whole of creation through the activities of thought." The soul is not the personality; the soul belongs to infinity. From such a point of view the Pythagoreans must have considered that only fools could imagine the soul-force to be all used up in the personality. For them too, as for Heraclitus, the essential point was the .awakening of the eternal in the personal. Knowledge for them meant intercourse with the eternal. The more a man Drought the eternal element within him into existence, the more highly were they bound to value him. Life in their community consisted in cultivating intercourse with the eternal. The object of Pythagorean education was to lead the members of the community to this intercourse. The education was therefore a philosophical initiation, and the Pythagoreans might well say that by their manner of life they were aiming at a goal similar to that of the Mysteries. ============================= 4 - Plato as a Mystic The importance of the Mysteries for the spiritual life of O«, Greeks can be seen in Plato's conception of the universe. 'there is only one way of understanding him thoroughly: he must be placed in the light which streams forth from the Mysteries. Plato's later disciples, the Neoplatonists, credit him with a secret doctrine which he imparted only to those who were worthy, and then under the "seal of secrecy". His teaching was looked upon as secret in the same sense as the wisdom of the Mysteries. Even if the seventh Platonic Epistle was not the work of Plato himself, as has been claimed, this makes no difference for our present purpose. It need not concern us whether Plato or someone else expressed the attitude of mind set forth in this letter, for this attitude was inherent in Plato's conception of the world. In the letter we read as follows: "This much I may say about all those who have written or may hereafter write as if they knew the aim of my endeavour-no credence is to be attached to their words, whether they obtained their information from me or from others, or invented it themselves. I have written nothing on this subject, nor would it be allowable to do so. A teaching of this kind cannot be expressed in words, as other teachings can be; it needs a long study of the subject and a making oneself with it. Then it is as though a spark leaps forth and kindles a light in the soul; a light which thereafter is able to sustain itself." This utterance might indicate only the writer's powerlessness to express his meaning in words-a mere personal weakness-if the idea of the Mysteries were not to be found in them. The subject on which Plato had not written, and would never write, must be something about which all writing would be futile. It must be a feeling, a sentiment, an experience, which is not gained by momentary communication, but by making oneself with it, in heart and soul. The reference is to the inner education which Plato was able to give to his chosen pupils. For them, fire flashed forth from his words; for others, only thoughts. The manner of our approach to Plato's Dialogues is not a matter of indifference. They will mean more or less to us, according to our spiritual condition. Much more passed from Plato to his disciples than the literal meaning of his words. In the place where he taught, his listeners lived in the atmosphere of the Mysteries. His words awoke overtones which vibrated in tune with them, but these overtones needed the atmosphere of the Mysteries, or they died away without having been heard. In the centre of the world of the Platonic Dialogues stands the personality of Socrates. We need not here touch upon the historical aspect of his personality. We are concerned with the character of Socrates as it appears in Plato. Socrates is a person consecrated by his having died for the truth. He died as only an initiate can die, as one to whom death is merely a moment of life like other moments. He approaches death as he would any other event in existence. His attitude towards it was such that even in his friends the feelings usual on such an occasion were not aroused. Phaedo, in the Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul, says: "Truly I found myself in a strange state of mind. I felt no compassion for him, as is usual at the death of a dear friend. So happy did the man appear to me in his demeanour and speech, so steadfast and noble was his end, that I was confident that he was not going to the underworld without a divine mission, and that even there it would be well with him, if it ever is with anyone. No tender-hearted emotion overcame me, as might have been expected at such a mournful event, nor on the other hand was I in a cheerful mood, as is usual during philosophical pursuits, although our conversation was of this nature; but I found myself in a wondrous state of mind, an unwonted blending of joy and grief, when reflecting that this man was about to die." The dying Socrates instructs his disciples about immortality. His personality, having learnt by experience the worthlessness of life, furnishes a kind of proof quite different from logic and arguments founded on reason. It seems as if it were not a man speaking, for this man was passing away, but the voice of eternal truth itself, which had taken up its abode in a perishable personality. Where the temporal dissolves into nothing, there seems to be a breath of the air in which the cternal can resound. We hear from Socrates no logical proofs of immortality. The whole discourse is designed to lead his friends to where they may behold the eternal. Then they will need no proofs. Would one have to prove that a rose is red to someone who has a rose before him? Why should one need to prove that the spirit is eternal to someone whose eyes we have opened to behold tile spirit? Socrates points to experiences, inner events, and first of all to the experience of wisdom itself. What is denied by someone who aspires after wisdom ? He ,wishes to free himself from all that the senses offer him in everyday perception. He seeks for the spirit in the sense-world Is not this a fact which may be compared with dying? "For", according to Socrates, "those who occupy themselves with philosophy in the right way are really striving after nothing else than to die and be dead, without this being noticed by others. If this is true, it would be strange if, after having aimed at this all through life, when death itself comes they should be indignant at something for which they have so long striven and exerted themselves". To corroborate this Socrates asks one of his friends: "Does it seem to you :fitting for a philosopher to take trouble about so-called pleasures of the senses, such as eating and drinking? Or about sexual pleasures? And do you think that such a man pays much heed to other bodily needs, or to fine clothes, shoes and other adornments? Do you think he values or despises them any more than his bare needs require? Does it not seem to you that it should be such a man's whole preoccupation not to turn his thoughts to the body, but as much as possible away from it and towards the soul? Therefore the first mark of the philosopher is that he, more than all other men, frees his soul from association with the body." Socrates is then entitled to say that aspiration after wisdom has this much in common with dying: it turns man away from the physical. But whither does he turn? Towards the spiritual. But can he desire the same from the spirit as from the senses? On this, Socrates says: "But how is it with rational knowledge itself? Is the body a hindrance or not, if we take it as a companion in our search for knowledge? I mean, do sight and hearing bring u s truth? Or are the poets wrong in always telling us that we never see or hear anything accurately .... When does the soul catch sight of truth ? For when it tries to examine something with the help of the body, the body evidently deceives it." Everything we perceive through our bodily senses comes and goes. And this coming into being and passing away is the cause of our being deceived. But if we look with rational insight more deeply into things, the eternal element in them is revealed to us. Thus the senses do not offer us the eternal in its true form. The moment we trust them implicitly, they deceive us. They cease to deceive us if we confront them with our thoughtful insight and submit what they tell us to its examination. But how could our thoughtful insight sit in judgment on the reports of the senses unless there were something living within it which transcends sense-perception? Therefore the truth or falsity in things is decided by something within us which opposes the physical body and so is not subject to its laws. Above all, this something cannot be subject to the laws of growth and decay, for it bears truth within itself. Now truth cannot have a yesterday and a today; it cannot be one thing one day and another the next, as happens with objects of sense. Therefore truth must be something eternal. And when the philosopher turns away from the perishable things of sense and towards truth, he is turning towards an eternal element that lives within him. If we immerse ourselves wholly in spirit, we shall live wholly in truth. The things of sense ;around us are no longer present merely in their physical form. "And he accomplishes this most perfectly," says Socrates, "who approaches everything as much as possible with the spirit only, without either looking round when he is thinking, or letting any other sense interrupt his reflecting; but, making use of pure thought only, he strives tee grasp everything as it is in itself, separating it as much as possible from eyes and ears, in short from the whole body, which only disturbs the soul and does not allow it to attain truth and insight when associated with the soul .... Now is not death the release and separation of the soul from the body? And it is only true philosophers who are :always striving to release the soul as far as they can. This, therefore, is the philosopher's vocation, to deliver and separate the soul from the body .... Hence it would be foolish if a man, who all his life has taken measures to be His near death as possible, should rebel against it when it comes .... In fact the real seekers after wisdom aspire t o die, and of all men they are those who least fear death." Moreover, Socrates bases all higher morality on liberation from the body. A man who follows only the demands of his body is not moral. Who is valiant? asks Socrates. He is valiant who does not obey his body but the demands of his spirit when these demands imperil the body. And who is self-controlled? Is it not he who "does not let himself be carried away by desires, but maintains an indifferent and seemly demeanour towards them? Therefore is not self-control most typical of those who set least value on the body and live in the love of wisdom"? And so it is, in the opinion of Socrates, with all the virtues. Socrates goes on to characterize rational insight. How do we come to know something? Undoubtedly, by forming judgments. I form a judgment about some object; for instance, I say to myself that the thing in front of me is a tree. How do I arrive at saying that? I can do it only if I already know what a tree is. I must recall my image of a tree. A tree is a material thing. If I remember a tree, I am therefore remembering a material thing. I say of something that it is a tree if it resembles other things I have previously observed and know to be trees. Memory is the key to this knowledge. It enables me to compare all sorts of material things with one another. But this does not exhaust my knowledge. If I see two similar things, I form a judgment and say they are alike. Now, in reality two things are never exactly alike. I can find a likeness only in certain respects. The idea of a perfect similarity therefore arises within me although it has no counterpart in the external world. And this idea helps me to form a judgment, just as memory helps me towards judgment and knowledge. Just as one tree reminds me of others, so am I reminded of the idea of similarity by looking at two things in relation to each other. Within me, therefore, thoughts and memories arise which are not due to physical reality. All kinds of knowledge not borrowed from sense-reality are grounded on such thoughts. The whole of mathematics consists of them. It would be a bad geometrician who could bring into mathematical relations only what he can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. Thus we have thoughts which do not originate in perishable nature, but arise out of the spirit. And it is these that bear in them the mark of eternal truth. The findings of mathematics will be eternally true, even if the whole cosmic system were to collapse tomorrow and an entirely new one were to arise. In another cosmic system conditions might prevail to which our present mathematical truths would not be applicable, but they would still be true in themselves. It is when the soul is alone with itself that it can bring forth these eternal truths. It is then related to the true and eternal, and not to the ephemeral and apparent. Hence Socrates says: `When the soul, returning into itself, reflects, it goes straight to what is pure and everlasting and immortal and like unto itself; and being related to this, cleaves to it when the soul is alone, and is not hindered. And then the soul rests from its mistakes, and is in communion with that which is like unto itself. And this state of soul is called wisdom .... Look now whether it does not follow, from all that has been said, that the soul is most like the divine, immortal, reasonable, unique, indissoluble, unchanging; while the body is most like the Human and mortal, the unreasonable, multiform, dissoluble and ever-changing .... If, therefore, this is so, the soul goes to what is like itself, to the immaterial, to the divine, immortal, reasonable. There it attains to bliss, freed from error and ignorance, from fear and undisciplined love and all other human evils. There it lives, as the initiates say, through all after-time truly with God." It is not within the scope of this book to indicate all the baths along which Socrates leads his friend to the eternal. These paths all breathe the same spirit. They all tend to show that man finds one thing when he goes the way of transitory sense-perception, and another when his spirit is alone with itself. It is to this original nature of spirit that Socrates points leis hearers. If they find it, they see with their own spiritual eyes that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove the Immortality of the soul; he simply lays bare the nature of the soul. And then it comes to light that growth and decay, birth and death, have nothing to do with the soul. The essence of tile soul lies in the true, and this can neither come into being nor perish. The soul has no more to do with becoming than the straight has with the crooked. But death belongs to the process of becoming. Therefore the soul has nothing to do with death. Must we not say of what is immortal that it admits of mortality as little as the straight admits the crooked? Must we not say, Socrates continues, that "if the immortal is imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to come to an end when death arrives? For from what has been already shown, it does not admit of death, nor can it die any more than three can be an even number." Let us trace the whole development of this dialogue, in which Socrates brings his hearers to behold the eternal in human personality. The hearers accept his thoughts, and they look into themselves to see if they can find in their inner experiences something which assents to his ideas. They make the objections which strike them. What has happened to the hearers when the dialogue is finished? They have found something within them which they did not possess before. They have not merely accepted an abstract truth; they have gone through a development. Something has come to life in them which was not living in them before. Is not this to be compared with an initiation? And does not this throw a light on why Plato set forth his philosophy in the form of conversation? These dialogues are meant to be nothing else than a literary form of the events which took place in the sanctuaries of the Mysteries. We are convinced of this from what Plato himself says in many passages. As a teacher of philosophy, he wished to be what the initiator into the Mysteries was, as far as this was possible in a philosophical style of communication. How clear it is that Plato feels himself to be in harmony with the Mysteries! He thinks he is on the right path only when it is taking him where the mystic should be led. He expresses this in the Timaeus: "All those who are of right mind invoke the gods for their small or great enterprises; but we who are concerned with teachings about the universe-how far it is created or uncreated-have the special duty, if we have not quite lost our way, to call upon and implore the gods and goddesses that we may teach everything first in conformity with their spirit, and next in harmony with ourselves." And Plato promises those who follow this path that the Godhead, as saviour, will ensure that their inquiry, so prone to error and ranging so far from the beaten track, will lead them finally to an illuminating teaching. It is especially the Timaeus that reveals to us how the Platonic cosmogony is connected with the Mysteries. At the \-ery beginning of this dialogue an "initiation" is referred to. Solon is "initiated" by an Egyptian priest into the formation of worlds, and the way in which eternal truths are symbolically expressed in traditional myths. "There have already been many and various destructions of part of the human race," says the Egyptian priest to Solon, "and there will be more in the future; the most extensive by fire and water and lesser ones through countless other causes. It is related also in your country that Phaeton, the son of Helios, once mounted his father's chariot, and as he did not know how to drive it, everything on the earth was burnt up, and he himself slain by lightning. This sounds like a fable, but the truth in it concerns changes in the movements of the celestial bodies revolving round the earth and of the destruction of everything on the earth by fierce fire. This annihilation happens periodically, after the lapse of certain long periods of time." This passage gives a clear indication of the attitude of the initiate towards folk-myths. He recognizes the truths hidden in their images. The drama of the creation of the world is brought before us in the Timaeus. Whoever wishes to follow the traces which lead back to this creation will come to the point of divining the primordial force from which all things have sprung. "Now to find the Creator and Father of the universe is difficult indeed, and then, having found Him, to speak about Him so that all may understand is impossible." The mystic knew what this "impossible" means. It signifies the drama of Divinity. God is not present for him in the materially comprehensible world. There He is present only as nature, where He is spell-bound. Only one who awakens the divine within himself is able to approach Him. Thus He cannot at once be made comprehensible to everyone. But even to one who approaches Him, He does not Himself appear. The Timaeus says this also. The Father made the universe out of the body and soul of the world. He mixed together, in harmony and perfect proportions, the elements which came into being when, pouring Himself out, He gave up His separate existence. Thereby the body of the world came into being, and stretched upon it, in the form of a cross, is the soul of the world. It is the divine element in the world. It met with the death on the cross so that the world might come into existence. Plato can therefore call nature the tomb of the divine; a grave, however, in which there lies nothing dead, but rather the eternal, to which death only gives the opportunity of bringing to expression the omnipotence of life. And man sees nature in the right light when he approaches it in order to release the crucified soul of the world. It must rise again from its death, from its spell. Where can it come to life again? Only in the soul of the initiated man. Then wisdom finds its right relation to the cosmos. The resurrection, the liberation, of God-that is what the attainment of true knowledge means. In the Timaeus the development of the world is traced from the imperfect to the perfect. An ascending process is represented imaginatively. Beings develop. God reveals Himself in their development. The process of evolution is the resurrection of God from the tomb. Within evolution, man appears. Plato shows that with man something special comes in. True, the whole world is divine, and man is not more divine than other beings. But in other beings God is present in a hidden way; in man, God is manifest. At the end of the Timaeus we read: "And now we might say that our discourse concerning the universe has reached its end, for after the world has been provided with mortal and immortal living beings and thereby fulfilled, it becomes itself a visible being embracing everything visible, and an image of the Creator. This one and only begotten world has become the God perceptible to the senses, and the greatest and best world, the fairest and most perfect there could be." But this one and only begotten world would not be perfect if the image of its Creator were not to be found among the images it contains. This image can be engendered in the human soul. Not the Father Himself, but God's offspring, the Son, living in the soul and like unto the Father-he it is who can be born of man. Philo, of whom it was said that he was Plato reborn, characterized as the "Son of God" the wisdom born of man, which lives in the soul and has as content the reason present in the world. This cosmic reason, or Logos, appears as the Look in which "everything enduring in the world is recorded and engraved". It also appears as the Son of God "following in the paths of the Father, he creates forms, while contemplating their archetypes". Philo, the Platonist, addresses this Logos as though he were speaking of the Christ: "As God is the first and only king of the universe, the way to Him is rightly called the `royal road'. Consider this road as philosophy . . . the road taken by the ancient company of ascetics, who turned away from the entangling fascination of pleasure and devoted themselves to a noble and earnest cultivation of the beautiful. The Law names this royal road, which we call true philosophy, the Word and Spirit of God." It is like an initiation for Philo when he enters upon this path, in order to meet the Logos who, for him, is the Son of God. "I do not shrink from relating what has happened to me innumerable times. Often when I wished to put my philosophical thoughts in writing in my accustomed way, and saw quite clearly what was to be set down, I found my mind barren and rigid, so that I was obliged to give up without having accomplished anything, and seemed to be beset with idle fancies. At the same time I marvelled at the power of the reality of thought, with which it rests to open and close the womb of the human soul. At other times, however, I would begin empty and arrive, without any trouble, at fullness. Thoughts came flying like snowflakes or grains of corn invisibly from above, and it was as though divine power took hold of me and inspired me, so that I did not know where I was, who was with me, who I was, or what I was saying or writing; for then a flow of ideas was given me, a delightful clearness, keen insight, and lucid mastery of material, as if the inner eye were now able to see everything with the greatest clarity." This is a description of a path to knowledge so expressed that we see how anyone taking it is conscious of flowing in one current with the divine when the Logos becomes alive within him. This is again put clearly in the words: "When the spirit, moved by love, takes its flight into the most holy, soaring joyfully on divine wings, it forgets everything else and itself. It holds to and is filled only with the Power of which it is the follower and servant, and to this it offers the incense of the most sacred and chaste virtue." For Philo there are only two ways. Either man follows the world of sense, open to observation and intellect, in which case he limits himself to his personality and withdraws from the cosmos; or he becomes conscious of the universal cosmic force, and experiences the eternal within his personality. "He who wishes to escape from God falls into his own hands. For there are two things to be considered, the universal Spirit, which is God, and one's own spirit. The latter flees to and takes refuge in the universal Spirit, for one who goes out beyond his own spirit says to himself that it is nothing and relates everything to God; but one who turns away from God discards Him as First Cause, and makes himself the cause of everything that happens. The Platonic view of the universe sets out to be a form of knowledge which by its very nature is also religion. It brings knowledge into relation with the highest to which man can attain through his feelings. Plato allows knowledge to hold good only when it completely satisfies human feelings. It is then not a knowledge merely of images; it is the very substance of life. It is a higher man within man, that man of which the personality is only an image. Within man is born a being who surpasses him, a primordial, archetypal man; and this is another secret of the Mysteries brought to expression in the Platonic philosophy. Hippolytus, one of the early Fathers, alludes to it: "This is the great secret of the Samothracians (the guardians of a certain Mystery-cult); an ineffable secret which only the initiates know. They speak in detail of Adam as the primordial, archetypal man." Plato's dialogue on love, the Symposium, also represents an initiation. Here love appears as the herald of wisdom. If wisdom, the eternal word, the Logos, is the Son of the eternal Creator of the cosmos, love is related to the Logos as a another. Before even a spark of the light of wisdom can flash tip in the human soul, an obscure impulse, a longing for the divine, must be present. Man must be drawn unconsciously towards the experience which, when it is raised into his consciousness, will constitute his supreme happiness. What Heraclitus calls the "daimon" in man is connected with the idea of love. In the Symposium, people of the most various ranks and with the most diverse views of life speak about love-the ordinary man, the politician, the learned man, the satiric poet Aristophanes and the tragic poet Agathon. Each has his own view of love, in keeping with their different experiences of life. How they express themselves shows the stage at which their "daimon" stands. By love one being is drawn to another. The manifold diversity of the things into which divine unity has been poured aspires towards unity and harmony through love. Hence love has something divine in it, and so each individual can understand it only as far as lie participates in the divine. After these men at different stages of maturity have set forth their ideas about love, Socrates takes up the discussion. He considers love from the point of view of a man in search of knowledge. For him, love is not a divinity, but something which leads man to God. Eros, or love, is for him not divine. God is perfect, and therefore possesses the beautiful and good; but Eros is only the desire for the beautiful and good. Eros thus stands between man and God. He is a "daimon", a mediator between the earthly and the divine. It is significant that Socrates does not claim to be giving his own thoughts when speaking of love. He says he is only relating what a woman once imparted to him as a revelation. It was through mantic art that he came to his conception of love. Diotima, the priestess, awakened in Socrates the daimonic force which was to lead him to the divine. She "initiated" him. This passage in the Symposium is highly suggestive. Who is the "wise woman" who awakened the daimon in Socrates? She is more than a merely poetic mode of expression. For no wise woman on the physical plane could awaken the daimon in the soul, unless the daimonic force were latent in the soul itself. It is surely in Socrates' own soul that we must look for this "wise woman". But there must be a reason why that which brings the daimon to life within the soul should appear as a real external being. This force cannot work in the same way as the forces we can observe in the soul as belonging to and native to it. Clearly, it is the soul-force which precedes the coming of wisdom that Socrates represents as a "wise woman". It is the mother-principle which gives birth to the Son of God, Wisdom, the Logos. The unconscious soul-force which brings the divine into consciousness is here represented as a feminine element. The soul which as yet is without wisdom is the mother of that which leads to the divine. This brings us to an important conception in mysticism. The soul is recognized as the mother of the divine. Unconsciously it leads man to the divine, with the inevitability of a natural force. This conception throws light on the view of Greek mythology taken in the Mysteries. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man looks upon the images he himself creates as his gods. But he must force his way through to another conception. He must transmute into divine images the divine force which is active within him before the creation of those images. Behind the divine appears the mother of the divine, which is nothing else than the original force of the human soul. So man places goddesses side by side with the gods. Let us look at the myth of Dionysos in this light. Dionysos is the son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. Zeus wrests the still immature infant from its mother when she is slain by lightning, and shelters it in his own thigh until it is ready to be born. Hera, the mother of the gods, incites the Titans against Dionysos and they dismember the body. But Pallas Athene rescues his heart, which is still beating, and brings it to Zeus. Out of it he engenders his son for the second time. In this myth we can accurately trace a process which is enacted in the depths of the human soul. Interpreting it in the manner of the Egyptian priest who instructed Solon about the nature of myths, we might say: It is related that Dionysos was the son of a god and of a mortal mother, that lie was torn in pieces and afterwards born again. This sounds like a fable, but it contains the truth of the birth of the divine and its destiny in the human soul. The divine unites itself with the earthly, temporal human soul. As soon as the divine, Dionysiac element stirs within the soul, it feels a vehement desire for its own true spiritual form. Ordinary consciousness, which again appears in the form of a female goddess, Hera, becomes jealous at the birth of the divine out of the higher consciousness. It stirs up the lower nature of man (the Titans). The still immature divine child is torn ire pieces. Thus the divine child is present in man as dismembered material science. But if there be enough of the higher wisdom (Zeus) in man to be active, it nurses and cherishes the immature child, which is then born again as a second son of God (Dionysos). Thus from knowledge, the fragmented divine force in man, is born undivided wisdom, the Logos, the son of God and of a mortal mother, who is the transitory human soul, which unconsciously aspires after the divine. As long as we see in all this merely a process in the soul and look upon it as a picture of this process, we are a long way from the spiritual reality which is enacted in it. In this spiritual reality the soul is not merely experiencing something in itself; it has been entirely released from itself and is taking part in a cosmic event, which in reality is not enacted within the soul, but outside it. Platonic wisdom and Greek myths are closely linked together; so too are the myths and the wisdom of the Mysteries. The created gods were the object of popular religion; the history of their origin was the secret of the Mysteries. No wonder that it was held to be dangerous to "betray" the Mysteries, for thereby the origin of the gods of the people was "betrayed". And a right understanding of that origin is salutary; a misunderstanding of it is destructive. ============================= 5 - The Wisdom of the Mysteries and Myth The mystic sought within himself for forces and beings which are unknown to man so long as he remains imprisoned in the ordinary conception of life. The mystic puts the great question about his own spiritual forces and the laws which transcend the lower nature. A man who takes the ordinary view of life, bounded by the senses and logic, creates gods for himself; or, when he gets to the point of seeing that he has made them, he disclaims them. The mystic knows that he creates gods, but he knows why he creates them; he sees, so to speak, behind the natural order which leads to their creation. It is as though a plant suddenly became conscious, and learned the laws of its growth and development. As things are, it develops in charming unconsciousness. If it knew about the laws of its own being, its relation to itself would be completely changed. What the lyric poet feels when he sings about a plant, what the botanist thinks when he investigates its laws--all this would hover before a conscious plant as an ideal of itself. So it is for the mystic with regard to the laws and forces working within him. As one who knows, he has to create something divine beyond himself. And the initiates took up the same attitude towards all that the people had created beyond nature, the world of popular gods and myths. They wanted to penetrate the laws of this world. Where the people saw the form of a god, or a myth, they looked for a higher truth. Let us take an example. The Athenians had been forced by the Cretan king Minos to deliver up to him every eight years seven boys and seven girls. They were thrown as food to a terrible monster, the Minotaur. When the mournful tribute was to be paid for the third time, the king's son Theseus accompanied it to Crete. On his arrival there, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, took his part. The Minotaur lived in a labyrinth, a maze from which no one who had gone in could find the way out. Theseus wished to deliver his native city from the shameful tribute. For this purpose he had to enter the labyrinth into which the monster's prey was habitually thrown, and then he had to kill the Minotaur. He undertook the task, overcame the formidable foe, and succeeded in regaining the open air with the aid of a ball of thread given him by Ariadne. The mystic had to discover how the creative human mind comes to weave such a story. As the botanist watches the growth of plants in order to discover its laws, so did the mystic study the creative spirit. He sought for a truth, a nucleus of wisdom, where the people had invented a myth. Sallust discloses the attitude of a mystical sage towards a myth of this kind. "We might call the .whole world a myth," he says, "for it embraces visible bodies and things, together with invisible souls and spirits. If the truth about the gods were taught to all, the unintelligent would disdain it through not understanding it, and the more capable would make light of it. But if the truth is given in a mythical veil, it is assured against contempt and serves as a stimulus to philosophic thinking." When the truth embodied in a myth was sought by an initiate, he was conscious of adding something which did not exist in the consciousness of the people. He was aware of being above that consciousness, as a botanist is above a growing plant. He put into words something different from anything present in the mythical consciousness, but it was looked upon as a deeper truth, symbolically expressed in the myth. Man is confronted with his own sense-nature as though by a hostile monster. He sacrifices to it the fruit of his personality; the monster devours them, and continues to do so until the conqueror (Theseus) awakes in man. His intellect spins the thread by means of which he finds his way out again when he enters the maze of the senses in order to slay his enemy. The mystery of human cognition itself is expressed in this conquering of the sense-nature. The initiate knows this mystery. It points to a force in human personality unknown to ordinary consciousness, but nevertheless active within it. This force creates the myth, which has the same structure as the mystical truth which underlies it. This truth finds its symbol in the myth. What then is to be found in the myths? They are a creation of the spirit, of the unconsciously creative soul. The soul has well-defined laws. In order to create beyond itself, it must work in a certain direction. At the mythological stage it does this in images, but these are built up according to the laws of the soul. We might also say that when the soul advances beyond the stage of mythological consciousness to deeper truths, they bear the same stamp as did the myths, for the same force has been at work in creating them. Plotinus, the Neoplatonic philosopher (A.D. 204-269), speaks of this relation of mythical imagery to higher knowledge with reference to the priest-sages of Egypt. "Whether as the result of rigorous investigations, or whether instinctively when imparting their wisdom, the Egyptian sages do not use, for expressing their teaching and precepts, written signs which are imitations of voice and speech. Instead, they draw pictures, and in their temple engravings they illustrate the thought that goes with each separate thing, so that every picture is an object which embodies knowledge and wisdom in a unity, without any explanation or discussion. Later, the content of the picture is drawn out and expressed in words, and the reason why it is as it is, and not otherwise is found." If we wish to discern the connection of mysticism with mythical narratives, we must see how they are related in the outlook of the great thinkers, those who knew their wisdom to be in harmony with the methods of the Mysteries. In Plato we find this exemplified to the highest degree. His explanations of myths and his use of them in his teaching may be taken as a model. In the Phaedrus, a dialogue on the soul, the myth of Boreas is introduced. This divine being, who was manifest in the rushing wind, one day saw the fair Orithyia, daughter of the Attic king Erectheus, gathering flowers with her companions. Seized with love for her, he carried her off to his cave. Plato, through the words of Socrates, rejects a purely rationalist interpretation of this myth. According to this explanation, a perfectly natural event is poetically symbolized by the narrative. A hurricane seized the king's daughter and hurled her over a cliff: "Interpretations of this sort," says Socrates, "are learned sophistries, however popular and customary they may be nowadays .... For anyone who has pulled to pieces one of these mythological patterns must, to be consistent, elucidate sceptically and explain naturally all the others in the same way .... But even if such a labour could be accomplished, it would be no proof of superior talents in the person responsible for it, but only of superficial wit, rustic shrewdness and laughable haste .... Therefore I leave on one side all such enquiries, and believe what is generally thought about the myths. I do not examine them, but I examine myself, to see whether I too may perhaps be a monster, more manifold and therefore more disordered than the chimaera, more savage than Typhon, or whether I represent a more docile and simple being, to whom some particle of a virtuous and divine nature has been given." Thus we see that Plato does not approve of a rationalistic and merely intellectual interpretation of myths. This attitude must be compared with the way in which he himself uses myths in order to express himself through them. When he speaks of the life of the soul, when he leaves the paths of the transitory and seeks the eternal soul, so that images borrowed from sense-perception and reasoning can no longer be used, then Plato has recourse to myth. Phaedrus treats of the eternal in the soul, which is portrayed as a chariot with two many-winged horses and a driver. One horse is patient and docile, the other wild and headstrong. If an obstacle comes along, the troublesome horse takes the opportunity of impeding the docile one and defying the driver. When the chariot reaches the point where it has to follow the gods up the celestial steep, the intractable horse throws the team into confusion. If it is weaker than the good horse, it is overcome, and the chariot is able to go on up into the supersensible realm. So it is that the soul can never ascend without difficulties into the kingdom of the divine. Some souls raise themselves to this vision of eternity further than others can. A soul which has seen the world beyond remains safe until the next journey. A soul which has seen nothing, because of the unruly horse, must try again on the next journey. These journeys signify the various incarnations of the soul. One journey signifies the life of the soul in one personality. The unruly horse represents the lower nature, the docile one the higher nature; the driver, the soul longing for union with the divine. Plato resorts to a myth in order to describe the course of the eternal spirit through its various transformations. In the same way he has recourse, in other writings, to myth, to symbolical narrative, in order to portray the inner nature of man, which is not perceptible to the senses. Plato is here in complete harmony with the mythical and allegorical manner of expression used by others. For example, in ancient Hindu literature there is a parable attributed to Buddha. A man very much attached to life, who seeks sensuous pleasures and is on no account willing to die, is pursued by four serpents. He hears a voice commanding him to feed and bathe the serpents from time to time. The man runs away, fearing the serpents. Again he hears a voice, warning him that he is pursued by five murderers. Once more he escapes. A voice calls his attention to a sixth murderer, who is about to behead him with the stroke of a sword. Again he flees. He comes to a deserted village. There he hears a voice telling him that robbers are about to plunder the village. Having again escaped, he comes to a great flood. He feels unsafe on his side of it, and out of straw, wood and leaves he makes a basket in which he reaches the other shore. Now he is safe; he is a Brahmin. The meaning of this allegory is that man has to pass through the most various states before attaining to the divine. The four serpents are the four elements, fire, water, earth, and air. The five murderers are the five senses. The deserted village is the soul which has escaped from senseimpressions, but is not yet safe when alone with itself, for if it takes hold of its lower nature only, it must perish. Man must construct for himself the boat which is to carry him over the flood of the transitory from one shore, the sensenature, to the other, the eternal, divine world. Let us look at the Egyptian mystery of Osiris in this light. Osiris had gradually become one of the most important Egyptian divinities; he supplanted other gods in certain parts of the country; and an important cycle of myths was formed round him and his consort Isis. Osiris was the son of the Sun-god; his brother was Typhon-Set; his sister was Isis. Osiris married his sister, and together they reigned over Egypt. The wicked brother, Typhon, plotted to destroy Osiris. He had a chest made which was exactly the length of Osiris's body. At a banquet the chest was offered to the person whom it exactly fitted. This turned out to be Osiris and no one else. Osiris lay down in the chest. Typhon and his confederates rushed upon him, closed the chest, and threw it into the river. When Isis heard the terrible news, she wandered far and wide in despair, seeking her husband's body. When she found it, Typhon again took possession of it. He tore it into fourteen pieces which were dispersed in many different places. Various tombs of Osiris were shown in Egypt. In many places, up and down the country, portions of the god were said to be buried. Osiris himself, however, came forth from the nether-world and vanquished Typhon. A ray shone from him upon Isis, who in consequence bore a son, Harpocrates or Horus. Now let us compare this myth with the view which the Greek philosopher, Empedocles (490-430 B.C.) takes of the universe. He assumes that a primal being was broken up into the four elements, fire, water, earth, and air, or into the multiplicity of existence. He posits two opposing powers, which within this world of existence bring about growth and passing away; they are love and strife. Empedocles says of the elements: They remain forever the same, but yet by combining their forces Become transformed into men and the numberless beings besides. These are now joined into one, love binding the many together, Now once again they are scattered, dispersed through hatred and strife. What then are the things in the world from Empedocles' point of view? They are the elements in different combinations. They could come into being only because the Primal Unity was broken up and poured into the four elements. Anything confronting us is part of the divinity which was poured out. But the divinity is hidden in the thing; it had to die so that things might come into being. And what are these things? Mixtures of divine constituents brought about by love and hatred. Empedocles says this distinctly: See, for a clear demonstration, how the limbs of a man are constructed, All that the body possesses, in beauty and pride of existence, Brought together by love, the elements forming a unity. Then come hatred and strife and fatally tear them asunder; Once more they wander alone, on the desolate confines of life. So it is with the bushes and trees, and the fishes that dwell in the waters, Wild animals roaming the mountains, and seabirds sailing on wings. Empedocles is therefore bound to conclude that the sage finds again the Divine Primal Unity, hidden in the world under a spell, entangled in the meshes of love and hatred. But if man finds the divine, he must himself be divine, for Empedocles holds that a being can be recognized only by its equal. The same conviction is expressed in Goethe's lines: "If the eye were not of the nature of the sun, how could we behold light? If God's own power were not at work in us, how could divine things delight us?" These thoughts about the world and man, which transcend sense-experience, could be discerned by the mystic in the myth of Osiris. Divine creative force has been poured out into the universe; it appears as the four elements; the God (Osiris) has been slain. Man is to raise him from the dead by means of his cognition, which is of divine nature. He is to find him again as Horus (the Son of God, the Logos, Wisdom), in the opposition between Strife (Typhon) and Love (Isis). Empedocles expresses his fundamental conviction in a Greek form by means of images which border on myth. Love is Aphrodite; strife is Neikos. They bind and loose the elements. The description of the content of a myth in the manner followed here must not be confused with a merely symbolical or even allegorical interpretation of myths. This is not intended. The images forming the substance of a myth are not invented symbols of abstract truths, but actual soul-experiences of the initiate. He experiences the images with his spiritual organs of perception, just as the normal man experiences images of physical things with his eyes and ears. But as an image is nothing in itself if it is not aroused by the perception of an outer object, so a mythical image is nothing unless it is activated by real facts of the spiritual world. The only difference is that in the physical world man is at first outside the activating causes, whereas he can experience the images of myth only when he is within the corresponding spiritual occurrences. In order, however, to be within them, he must, according to the ancient mystics, have gone through initiation. Then the spiritual occurrences he perceives are, as it were, illustrated by the myth-images. Anyone who cannot take the mythical element as an illustration of real spiritual occurrences has not yet come to understand it. For the spiritual events themselves are supersensible, and images which are reminiscent of the physical world are not themselves of a spiritual nature, but only an illustration of spiritual things. One who lives merely in the images lives in a dream. Only one who has reached the point of recognizing the spiritual element in the image, just as in the sense-world he recognizes a rose through the image of a rose, really lives in spiritual perceptions. That is why the images of myths cannot leave only one meaning. Because of their illustrative character, the same myths may express various spiritual facts. It is not therefore a contradiction when interpreters of myths sometimes connect a myth with one spiritual fact and sometimes with another. From this standpoint we can find a thread to lead us through the labyrinth of Greek myths. Let us consider the saga of Heracles. The twelve labours imposed upon Heracles appear in a higher light when we remember that before the last and most difficult one, he is initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. He is commissioned by King Eurystheus of Mycenae to bring the hell-hound Cerberus from the infernal regions and take it back again. In order to make his way into the underworld, Heracles had to be initiated. The Mysteries conducted a man through the death of perishable things, therefore into the nether-world, and by initiation they rescued his eternal part from perishing. As a mystic he could vanquish death. Heracles, having become a mystic, overcomes the dangers of the nether-world. This justifies us in interpreting his other ordeals as stages in the inner development of the soul. He overcomes the Nemaean lion and brings him to Mycenae. This means that he becomes master of the purely physical force in man; he tames it. Afterwards he slays the nineheaded Hydra. He overcomes it with firebrands and dips his arrows in its gall, so that they become deadly. This means that he overcomes lower knowledge, the knowledge gained through the senses. He does so with the fire of the spirit, and what he has won from the lower knowledge gives him the power to see lower things in the light which belongs to spiritual sight. Heracles captures the hind of Artemis, goddess of the chase; everything which free nature offers to the human soul, Heracles hunts down. The other labours may be interpreted in the same way. We cannot here trace out every detail, and wish only to show how the general sense of the myth points to inner development. The expedition of the Argonauts can be interpreted in a similar way. Phrixus and his sister Helle, children of a Boeotian king, suffered many things from their stepmother. The gods sent them a ram with a golden fleece, which carried them away through the air. When they came to the strait between Europe and Asia, Helle was drowned. Hence the strait is called the Hellespont. Phrixus came to the King of Colchis, on the east shore of the Black Sea. He sacrificed the ram to the gods, and gave its fleece to King Aetes. The king had it hung up in a grove and guarded by a terrible dragon. The Greek hero Jason, in company with other heroes, Heracles, Theseus and Orpheus, undertook to fetch the fleece from Colchis. Heavy tasks were laid upon Jason by Aetes for obtaining the treasure, but Medea, the king's daughter, who was versed in magic, aided him. He subdued two fire-breathing bulls. He ploughed a field and sowed in it dragon's teeth, from which armed men grew up out of the earth. By Medea's advice he threw a stone into their midst, whereupon they killed each other. Jason lulls the dragon to sleep with a charm provided by Medea, and is then able to win the fleece. He returns with it to Greece, Medea accompanying him as his wife. The king pursues the fugitives. In order to delay him, Medea kills her little brother Absyrtus, and scatters his limbs in the sea. Aetes stays to collect them, and the pair are able to reach Jason's home with the fleece. Each of these facts requires a deep elucidation. The fleece is something belonging to man, and infinitely precious to him. It is something from which he was separated in ancient times, and for the recovery of which he has to overcome terrible powers. So it is with the eternal in the human soul. It belongs to man, but man is separated from it by his sower nature. Only by overcoming the latter, and lulling it to sleep, can he recover the eternal. This becomes possible when his own consciousness (Medea) comes to his aid with its magic power. Medea is to Jason what Diotima was to Socrates, a teacher of love. Man's own wisdom has the magic power necessary for attaining the divine, after having overcome the transitory. From the lower nature there can arise only a lower human principle, the armed men who are overcome by spiritual force, the counsel of Medea. Even when man has found the eternal, the fleece, he is not yet safe. He has to sacrifice part of his consciousness (Absyrtus). This is exacted by the physical world, which we can apprehend only as a manifold (dismembered) world. We might go still deeper into the description of the spiritual events lying behind the images, but our intention here is only to indicate the principle underlying the formation of myths. Of particular interest, when interpreted in this way, is the legend of Prometheus. He and his brother Epimethius are sons of the Titan Iapetus. The Titans are the offspring of the oldest generation of gods, Uranos (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father and seized for himself the government of the world. In return, he was overpowered, together with the other Titans, by his son Zeus, who became the chief of the gods. In the struggle with the Titans, Prometheus was on the side of Zeus. On his advice, Zeus banished the Titans to the nether-world. But in Prometheus there still lived the Titan frame of mind; he was only half a friend to Zeus. When Zeus wished to exterminate men on account of their arrogance, Prometheus took up their cause, taught them numbers, writing, and everything else which leads to culture, especially the use of fire. This aroused the wrath of Zeus against Prometheus. Hephaistos, the son of Zeus, was commissioned to make a female form of great beauty, whom the gods adorned with every possible gift. She was called Pandora, the all-gifted. Hermes, messenger of the gods, led her to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. She brought him a casket, a present from the gods. Epimetheus accepted the present, although Prometheus had warned him against receiving any gift from the gods. When the casket was opened, all possible human afflictions flew out of it. Hope alone remained, and this because Pandora quickly closed the box. Hope has therefore been left to man, as a doubtful gift of the gods. By order of Zeus, Prometheus was chained to a rock on the Caucasus, on account of his relations with men. An eagle perpetually gnaws his liver, which is as often renewed. He has to pass his life in agonizing loneliness until one of the gods voluntarily sacrifices himself-i.e. dedicates himself to death. The tormented Prometheus bears his sufferings steadfastedly. He had been told that Zeus would be dethroned by the son of a mortal unless Zeus consented to wed this mortal woman. It was important for Zeus to know this secret. He sent the messenger Hermes to Prometheus in order to learn something about it. Prometheus refused to say anything. The legend of Heracles is connected with that of Prometheus. In the course of his wanderings Heracles comes to the Caucasus. He slays the eagle which was devouring the liver of Prometheus. The centaur Chiron, who cannot die, though suffering from an incurable wound, sacrifices himself for Prometheus, who is thereupon reconciled with the gods. The Titans are the force of will, proceeding in the form of nature (Kronos) from the original universal spirit (Uranos). Here we have to think not merely of will-forces in an abstract form, but of actual will-beings. Prometheus is one of them; this characterizes his nature. But he is not altogether a Titan. In a certain sense he is on the side of Zeus, the spiritual power, who took over the rulership of the world after the unbridled force of nature (Kronos) had been subdued. Prometheus is thus the representative of those worlds which have given man his forward-striving will, half nature-force, half spiritual force. The will points on the one side towards good; on the other, towards evil. Its fate is determined by whether it leans to the spiritual or to the perishable. This fate is that of man himself: He is chained to the perishable; the eagle gnaws him; he has to suffer. He can reach the highest only by seeking his destiny in solitude. He has a secret: the divine (Zeus) must marry a mortal (human consciousness bound up with the physical body), in order to beget a son, human wisdom (the Logos), who will set the god free. By this means consciousness becomes immortal. He must not betray this secret until a mystic (Heracles) comes to him, and annihilates the power which was perpetually threatening him with death. A being half-animal, half-human, a centaur, is obliged to sacrifice itself to redeem man. The centaur is man himself, halfanimal, half-spiritual. He must die in order that the purely spiritual man may be delivered. The gift disdained by Prometheus, the human will, is accepted by Epimetheus, reason or prudence. But the gifts offered to Epimetheus are only troubles and sorrows, for reason clings to the transitory and perishable. And only one thing is left-the hope that even out of the perishable the eternal may some day be born. The thread running through the legends of the Argonauts, Heracles and Prometheus is relevant also to Homer's Odyssey. This method of interpretation may here seem forced. But on closer consideration of everything which has to be taken into account, even the sturdiest doubter must lose all misgivings about such an interpretation. Above all, it is surprising to be told that Odysseus, also, descended into the underworld. Whatever we may think about the author of the Odyssey in other respects, it is impossible to imagine that he would depict a mortal descending into the underworld without bringing him into connection with what the journey into the nether-world meant for the Greeks. It meant the conquest of the perishable and the awakening of the eternal in the soul. It must therefore be conceded that Odysseus accomplished this, and thereby his experiences, like those of Heracles, acquire a deeper significance. They become a description not of the sense-world, but of the soul's path of development. Hence the Odyssey is not narrated in the way required by a series of external events. The hero makes voyages in enchanted ships. Geographical distances are handled in the most arbitrary fashion. Physical reality is not the point. This becomes comprehensible if the outward events are related only to illustrate the development of a soul. Moreover, the poet himself at the opening of the work says that it is concerned with a search for the soul: "O Muse, sing to me of the man full of resource, who wandered widely after he had destroyed the sacred city of Troy. The cities of many men he saw, and learned their manners. Many the woes he suffered on the sea, while striving to gain his own soul, and the return of his companions." We have before us a man seeking for the soul, for the divine, and his wanderings during this search are narrated. He comes to the land of the Cyclops. They are uncouth giants, with only one eye in the centre of their foreheads. The most terrible, Polyphemus, devours several of Odysseus' companions. Odysseus himself escapes by blinding the Cyclops. Here we have to do with the first stage of life's pilgrimage. Physical power, or the lower nature, has to be overcome. It devours anyone who does not take away its power, who fails to blind it. Odysseus comes next to the island of the enchanting Circe. She changes some of his companions into grunting pigs. She also is subdued by Odysseus. Circe is the lower mind-force, which cleaves to the transitory. If misused, it may thrust men down even deeper into bestiality. Odysseus has to overcome it. Then he is able to descend into the underworld. He becomes a mystic. Now he is exposed to the dangers which beset the mystic on his progress from the lower to the higher degrees of initiation. He comes to the Sirens, whose magically sweet singing lures the passer-by to death. These are the forms of the lower imagination, pursued first of all by one who has freed himself from the dominion of the senses. He has come as far as free creative activity, but he is not initiated. He pursues illusions, from the power of which he has to break loose. Odysseus then has to accomplish the awful passage between Scylla and Charybdis. The mystic, at the beginning of the path, wavers between spirit and sensuality. He cannot yet grasp the full value of spirit, but sensuality has already lost its former worth. All Odysseus' companions perish in a shipwreck; he alone escapes and comes to the nymph Calypso, who receives him kindly and takes care of him for seven years. At length, by order of Zeus, she dismisses him to his home. The mystic has reached a stage where all his fellow-aspirants fail; he alone, Odysseus, is worthy. For a certain time, defined by the mystically symbolic number seven, he enjoys the restful experiences of gradual initiation. On his way home, Odysseus comes to the isle of the of the Phaeaces, where he meets with a hospitable reception. The king's daughter shows him sympathy, and the king, Alcinous, entertains and honours him. Once again Odysseus encounters the world and its joys, and the spirit which is attached to the world, (Nausicaa) awakens in him. But he finds the way home, to the divine. At first nothing good awaits him at home. His wife, Penelope, is surrounded by numerous suitors. To each she promises marriage, when she has finished a certain piece of weaving. She avoids keeping her promise by unravelling every night what she has woven by day. Odysseus is obliged to vanquish the suitors before he can be reunited to his wife in peace. The goddess Athene changes him into a beggar so that he may not at first be recognized at his entry; and thus he overcomes the suitors. Odysseus is seeking his own deeper consciousness, the divine powers of the soul. He wishes to be united with them. Before a mystic can find them, he has to overcome everything which sues for the favour of that consciousness. The suitors spring from the world of lower reality, from perishable nature. The logic directed against them is a weaving which always unravels itself after it has been spun. Wisdom (the goddess Athene) is the sure guide to the deepest powers of the soul. It changes man into a beggar-i.e. it divests him of everything of a transitory nature. The Eleusinian festivals, celebrated in Greece in honour of Demeter and Dionysos, were steeped in the wisdom of the Mysteries. A sacred road led from Athens to Eleusis. It was bordered with mysterious signs, designed to bring the soul into an exalted mood. In Eleusis were mysterious temples, served by families of priests. The high-ranking priesthood and the wisdom bound up with it were inherited in these families from generation to generation. (Instructive information about the organization of these sanctuaries will be found in Karl Botticher's Ergdnzungen zu den letzten Untersuchungen auf der Akropolis in Athen, Philologus, Supplement, vol. III, part 3.) The wisdom which qualified for the priesthood was the wisdom of the Greek Mysteries. The festivals, celebrated twice a year, represented the great world-drama of the destiny of the divine in the world and the fate of the human soul. The lesser Mysteries were in February, the greater in September. Initiations were connected with the festivals. The symbolical presentation of the cosmic and human drama formed the final act of the initiations which took place here. The Eleusinian temples had been built in honour of the goddess Demeter. She was a daughter of Kronos. She had given Zeus a daughter, Persephone, before his marriage with Hera. Persephone, while playing, was carried away by Hades (Pluto), the god of the underworld. Demeter wandered far and wide over the earth, seeking her daughter. While seated on a stone in Eleusis, she was found by the daughters of Keleus, a local ruler. In the form of an old woman she entered the service of his family as nurse to the queen's son. She wished to endow this boy with immortality, and for this purpose hid him in fire every night. When his mother discovered this, she wept and lamented. After that the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus then built a temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone was unbounded. She spread sterility over the earth. The gods had to appease her, to prevent a fearful catastrophe. Zeus then induced Pluto to release Persephone into the upper world; but before letting her go he gave her a pomegranate to eat. This obliged her to return periodically to the underworld for ever after. Henceforward she spent a third of the year there, and two-thirds in the world above. Demeter was placated and returned to Olympus; but at Eleusis, the place of her suffering, she founded the cult which was to keep her fate in perpetual remembrance. The meaning of the myth of Demeter and Persephone is not hard to discern. It is the soul which lives alternately above and below. The immortality of the soul, and its perpetually recurring transformation by birth and death, are thus symbolized. The soul originates from the immortal-Demeter. But it is led astray by the transitory, and even prevailed upon to share the destiny of transient things. It has partaken of the fruits of the nether-world, and having thus sated itself with the transitory, it cannot live permanently in the heights of the divine. It has always to return to the realms of the perishable. Demeter represents the being from which human consciousness arose; but we must think of it as having been able to come into existence through the spiritual forces of the earth. Thus Demeter is the primordial being of the earth, and the endowment of the earth through her with the seed-forces of the crops points to a still deeper aspect of her nature. She wishes to give man immortality and hides her nursling in fire by night. But man cannot bear the pure force of fire (the spirit). Demeter is obliged to abandon the attempt. All she can do is to found a temple ritual, through which man is enabled to participate as far as he can in the divine. The Eleusinian festivals were an eloquent confession of belief in the immortality of the human soul. This confession found symbolic expression in the Persephone myth. Together with Demeter and Persephone, Dionysos was commemorated in Eleusis. While Demeter was honoured as the divine creatress of the eternal in man, in Dionysos was honoured the ever-changing divine in the world. The god who had been poured into the world, and torn to pieces in order to be spiritually reborn, had to be honoured together with Demeter. (A brilliant description of the spirit of the Eleusinian Mysteries will be found in Edouard Schure's book, Sanetvaries d'Orient. Paris, 1898.) ============================= 6 - Egyptian Mystery Wisdom "When, set free from the body, you rise up into the free aether, you become an immortal god, having escaped from death." In these words Empedocles epitomizes what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal element in man and its connection with the divine. A proof of this can be found in the so-called Book of the Dead, which has been deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth-century scholars (cf. Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der alten Agypter, Berlin, 1842). It is "the greatest coherent literary work which has come down to its from ancient Egypt". It embraces all kinds of instructions and prayers which were placed in the tomb of a deceased person to serve as a guide when he was released from his mortal tenement. The most intimate ideas of the Egyptians about the Eternal and the origin of the world are contained in this work. They point to conceptions of the gods similar to those held by Greek mysticism. Osiris gradually became the favourite and most widely recognized of the various deities worshipped in different parts of Egypt. The ideas about the other divinities were brought together in him. Whatever the majority of the Egyptian people may have thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead indicates that priestly wisdom saw in him a being who might be found in the human soul itself. Everything said about death and the dead shows this plainly. While the body is given to earth and preserved there, the eternal part of man enters upon the path to the eternal Primality. It comes to judgment before Osiris, who is surrounded by forty-two judges of the dead. The fate of the eternal part of man depends upon the verdict of these judges. If the soul has confessed its sins and is deemed reconciled to eternal justice, invisible powers approach it and say: "The Osiris N has been purified in the pool which lies south of the field of Hotep and north of the field of Locusts, where the gods of verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour of the night and the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day." Thus, within the eternal cosmic order, the eternal part of man is addressed as an Osiris. After the name Osiris comes the deceased person's own name. And the person who is being united with the eternal cosmic order also calls himself "Osiris". "I am the Osiris N. Growing under the blossoms of the fig-tree is the name Osiris N." So man becomes an Osiris. Being Osiris is only a perfected stage of human development. It seems obvious that even the Osiris who is a judge within the eternal cosmic order is no more than a perfected man. Between human existence and divine existence there is a difference in degree and in number. At the root of this is the view of the Mysteries concerning the secret of "number". Osiris as a cosmic being is One; therefore he is present undivided in each human soul. Each person is an Osiris, yet the One Osiris must be represented as a separate being. Man is engaged in development; his evolutionary course will culminate in his existence as a god. In this context we must speak of divinity, rather than of a separate divine being, complete in himself. There can be no doubt, according to this view, that a person can really enter upon the Osiris existence only if he has already reached the portals of the eternal cosmic order as an Osiris. Hence the highest life a man can lead must consist in changing himself into Osiris. Even during mortal life, a true man will live as a perfect Osiris as far as he can. He becomes perfect when he lives as an Osiris, when he passes through the experiences of Osiris. Thus we see the deeper significance of the Osiris myth. It becomes the ideal of the man who wishes to awaken the eternal within him. Osiris had been torn to pieces, killed by Typhon. The fragments of his body were cherished and cared for by his consort, Isis. After his death he caused a ray of his own light to fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. Horus took up the earthly tasks of Osiris. He is the second Osiris, still imperfect, but progressing towards the true Osiris. The true Osiris is in the human soul, which is at first of a transitory nature but is destined to give birth to the eternal. Man may therefore regard himself as the tomb of Osiris. The lower nature (Typhon) has killed the higher nature in him. The love in his soul (Isis) must cherish the dead fragments of his body, and then the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus) will be born, which can progress to Osiris life. A man who is aspiring to the highest form of existence must repeat in himself, as a microcosm, the macrocosmic Osiris process. That is the meaning of Egyptian initiation. What Plato describes as a cosmic process-that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world on the body of the world in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic process is the release of this crucified soul-this process had to be enacted in man on a smaller scale if he was to be qualified for the Osiris existence. The candidate for initiation had to develop himself in such a way that his soul-experience, his becoming an Osiris, blended into one with the cosmic Osiris process. If we could look into the temples of initiation where persons underwent the transformation into Osiris, we should see that what took place represented in microcosm a process of world-evolution. Man, who is descended from the "Father", was to give birth in himself to the Son. The divinity he bears within him, hidden under a spell, was to become manifest in him. This divinity is suppressed by the power of his earthly nature; this lower nature must first be buried in order that the higher nature may arise. Thus we are able to interpret what we are told about the incidents of initiation. The candidate was subjected to secret processes, by means of which his earthly nature was killed and his higher part awakened. It is not necessary to study these processes in detail, so long as we understand their meaning. This is conveyed in the confession that every one who went through initiation could make. He could say: "Before me hovered the endless perspective, at the end of which is the perfection of the divine. I felt that the power of the divine is within me, I buried all that holds down this power. I died to earthly things. I was dead. I had died as a lower man; I was in the underworld. I had intercourse with the dead: that is, with those who had already become part of the eternal cosmic order. After my sojourn in the underworld, I rose from the dead. I overcame death, but now I have become a different person. I have nothing more to do with perishable nature: in me it has become permeated with the Logos. I now belong to those who live eternally, and who will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself shall be a true Osiris, part of the eternal cosmic order, and judgment of life and death will be placed in my hands." The candidate for initiation had to submit to the experience which made such a confession possible for him. It was thus an experience of the highest order. Let us now imagine that a non-initiate hears of such experiences. He cannot know what has really taken place in the initiate's soul. In his eyes, the initiate died physically, lay in the grave, and rose again. Something which is a spiritual reality at a higher stage of existence appears in the realm of sense-reality as an event which breaks through the order of nature. It is a "miracle". Initiation was a "miracle" in this sense. Anyone who really wished to understand it must have awakened inner powers to enable him to stand on a higher plane of existence. He must have approached these higher experiences through a course of life specially adapted for the purpose. In whatever way these prepared experiences were enacted in individual cases, they are always found to be of a quite definite type. And so an initiate's life is a typical one. It may be described independently of any single personality. Or rather, an individual could be described as being on the way to the divine only if he had passed through these typical experiences. Such a personality was Buddha, living in the midst of his disciples. As such a one did Jesus appear at first to his circle of followers. Nowadays we know of the parallelism between the biographies of Buddha and of Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has shown it convincingly in his book, Buddha and Christus. (Compare also the excellent essay by Dr. Hubbe-Schleiden, Jesus ein Buddhist.) We have only to follow out the two lives in detail in order to see that all objections to the parallelism are invalid. The birth of Buddha is announced by a white elephant, which overshadows the queen, Maya, and tells her that she will bring forth a divine man, who "will attune all beings to love and friendship, and will unite them in a close inward bond". We read in St. Luke's Gospel: ". . . to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came to her, and said, `Hail, thou that art highly favoured .... Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High'." The Brahmins, or Indian priests, who know what the birth of a Buddha means, interpret Maya's dream. They have a definite, typical idea of a Buddha, to which the life of the personality about to be born will have to correspond. Similarly we read in Matthew II, 4, that when Herod "had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born". The Brahmin Asita says of Buddha: "This is the child who will become Buddha, the redeemer, the leader to immortality, freedom, and light." Compare with this Luke 2:25: "And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and this man was just as devout, looking for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Spirit was upon him .... And when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, he took up the child in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel." It is related of Buddha that at the age of twelve he was lost, and found again under a tree, surrounded by poets and sages of that ancient time, whom he was teaching. With this incident the following passage in St. Luke corresponds "Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. And when the feast was over and they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers" (Luke 2:4I-47) . After Buddha had lived in solitude, and returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin; "Blessed is thy mother, blessed is thy father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest." But he replied, "Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana"-i.e. those who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In St. Luke's Gospel (11:27), we read: "And it came to pass, as he spoke these words, a certain woman in the crowd lifted up her voice and said to him, `Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.' But he said, `Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God, and keep it'." In the course of Buddha's life, the tempter comes to him and promises him all the kingdoms of the earth. Buddha refuses everything with the words: "I know well that I am destined to have a kingdom, but I do not desire an earthly one. I shall become Buddha and make all the world exult with joy." The tempter has to admit, "My reign is over". Jesus answers the same temptation with the words: "Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil left him" (Matthew 4:10,11). This account of the parallelisms might be extended to many other points, with the same results. The life of Buddha ended sublimely. During a journey he felt ill; he came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There 'lie lay down on a carpet spread for him by his favourite disciple, Ananda. His body began to shine from within. He died transfigured, as a body of light, saying, "Nothing endures". The death of Buddha corresponds with the transfiguration of Jesus. "And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up on to a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white." Buddha's earthly life ends at this point, but it is here that the most important part of the life of Jesus begins-His suffering, death, and resurrection. The difference between Buddha and Christ lies in the necessity that required the life of Christ to continue beyond that of Buddha. Buddha and Christ will not be understood simply by mixing them together. (Later chapters will make this clear.) Other accounts of Buddha's death will not be considered here, although they reveal profound aspects of the subject. The agreement in these two redemptive lives leads to an unequivocal conclusion, indicated by the narratives themselves. When the priest-sages hear what kind of birth is to take place, they know what is involved. They know they have to do with a divine man; they know beforehand what kind of personality is appearing. And therefore the course of his life must correspond with what they know about the life of a divine man. In the wisdom of their Mysteries such a life is traced out for all eternity. It can be only as it must be; it comes into manifestation like an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can behave only in a quite definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can live only in a quite definite way. The true course of his life is not described by writing an episodic biography, but far better by relating the typical features which are contained for all time in the wisdom of the Mysteries. The Buddha legend is no more a biography in the ordinary sense than the Gospels are meant to be a biography in the ordinary sense of Christ Jesus. In neither is the merely accidental given; both relate the course of life marked out for a world-redeemer. The source of the two accounts is to be found in the Mystery traditions, not in external history. For those who have recognized their divine nature, Buddha and Jesus are initiates in the most eminent sense. (Jesus is an initiate through the indwelling of the Christ Being in him.) Hence their lives are lifted out of transitory things, and what is known about initiates applies to them. The casual incidents in their lives are not narrated. Of such it might be announced "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us". But the life of Jesus contains more than that of Buddha. Buddha's life ends with the Transfiguration; the most momentous part of the life of Jesus begins after the Transfiguration. In the language of initiates this means that Buddha reached the point at which divine light begins to shine in men. He is on the verge of earthly death. He becomes the cosmic light. Jesus goes farther. He does not die physically at the moment when the cosmic light shines through him. At that moment he is a Buddha. But at that same moment he enters upon a stage which finds expression in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. The earthly element disappears. But the spiritual element, the cosmic light, does not. His resurrection follows. He is revealed to his followers as Christ. Buddha, at the moment of his Transfiguration, flows into the blissful life of the Universal Spirit. Christ Jesus awakens the Universal Spirit once more, but in a human form, in present existence. Such an event had formerly taken place in a pictorial sense during the higher stages of initiation. Those initiated in the spirit of the Osiris myth attained to such a resurrection in their consciousness as a pictorial experience. In the life of Jesus, this "great" initiation was added to the Buddha initiation, not as an imaginal experience but as a reality. Buddha showed by his life that man is the Logos, and that lie returns to the Logos, to the light, when his earthly part dies. In Jesus, the Logos itself became a person. In him the Word was made flesh. The ritual enacted in the inner recesses of the ancient Mystery temples was therefore transmuted, through Christianity, into a fact of world history. His community recognized Christ Jesus as an initiate who had been initiated in a uniquely great way. He proved to them that the world is divine. For the community of Christians, the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. That which man had previously sought to attain through the Mysteries was now replaced by the belief that Christ had lived in earth, and that the faithful belonged to Him. Henceforth, part of what had formerly been attainable only through mystical methods could be replaced, for Christian adherents, by the conviction that the divine had been manifested in the Word present among them. The sole decisive factor now was not something for which each individual soul had to undergo a long preparation, but what had been seen and heard, and was handed down by those who were with Jesus. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which . . . our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life . . . that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, so that you may have fellowship with us." Thus do we read in the first Epistle of St. J ohm. And this immediate reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond of union, and as a church is to extend mystically from race to race. It is in this sense that the words of St. Augustine are to be understood: "I should not believe the Gospels if I were not moved thereto by the authority of the Catholic Church." Thus the Gospels do not contain within themselves evidence for their truth, but they are to be believed because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because the Church mysteriously draws from that personality the power to make the truth of the Gospels manifest. The Mysteries handed down traditionally the means of arriving at truth; the Christian community itself propagates the truth. To the confidence in the mystical forces which light up in the inner being of man during initiation, was to be added confidence in the One, primal Initiator. The Mystics sought to become divine; they wished to experience divinity. Jesus was made divine; we must hold fast to Him, and then we shall become partakers of His divinity, in the community founded by Him-that became the Christian conviction. That which became divine in Jesus was made so for all His followers. "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. (Matt. XXVIII., 20). He who was born in Bethlehem has an eternal character. Thus the Christmas antiphon speaks of the birth of Jesus as if it took place each Christmas: "Christ is born to-day; the Saviour has come into the world to-day; to-day the angels are singing on earth." In the Christ-experience is to be seen a definite stage of initiation. When the mystic of pre-Christian times passed through this Christ-experience, he was, through his initiation, in a state which enabled him to perceive spiritually, in the higher worlds, something to which no fact in the world of sense corresponded. He experienced that which comprises the Mystery of Golgotha in the higher world. If the Christian mystic goes through this experience by initiation, he beholds the historical event which took place on Golgotha, and at the same time he knows that this event, enacted in the physical world, has the spiritual content that could formerly be found only in the super sensible facts of the Mysteries. Thus there was poured out on the Christian community, through the Mystery of Golgotha, that which had formerly been poured out on the mystics within the temples. And initiation gives Christian mystics the possibility of becoming conscious of what is contained in the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas faith makes man an unconscious partaker of the mystical stream which flowed from the events depicted in the New Testament and has ever since permeated the spiritual life of humanity. ============================= 7 - The Gospels The accounts of the life of Jesus which can be submitted to historical examination are contained in the Gospels. Whatever does not come from this source might, in the opinion of one of those who are considered to be the greatest historical authorities on the matter (Harnack), be "easily written on a quarto page". But what kind of documents are these Gospels? The fourth, that of St. John, differs so much from the others that those who feel obliged to follow the path of historical research in order to study the subject come to the conclusion: "If John possesses the genuine tradition about the life of Jesus, that of the first three Evangelists (the Synoptists) is untenable. If the Synoptists are right, the Fourth Gospel must be rejected as a historical source" (Otto Schmiedel, Die Hauptprobleme der Leben Jesu Forschung, p. 15). This is a statement made from the standpoint of the historical investigator. In the present work, in which we are dealing with the mystical content of the Gospels, such a point of view is to be neither accepted nor rejected. But attention must certainly be drawn to such an opinion as the following: "Measured by the standard of consistency, inspiration and completeness, these writings leave very much to be desired, and even measured by ordinary human standards, they suffer from not a few imperfections." That is the opinion of a Christian theologian (Harnack, Wesen des Christentums). Anyone who takes his stand on a mystical origin of the Gospels can easily explain the inconsistencies, and he will also discern harmony between the fourth Gospel and the three others. For none of these writings is meant to be mere historical tradition in the ordinary sense of the word. They do not profess to give a historical biography. What they intended to give was already shadowed forth in the traditions of the Mysteries as the typical life of a Son of God. It was these traditions that were drawn upon, not history; and it was only natural that they should not be in complete verbal agreement in every Mystery centre. Still, the agreement was so close that the Buddhists narrated the life of their divine man in almost the same way as the Evangelists narrated the life of Christ. But of course there were differences. We have only to assume that the four Evangelists drew from four different Mystery traditions. It testifies to the towering personality of Jesus that in four writers, belonging to different traditions, he awakened the belief that he so perfectly corresponded with their type of an initiate that they were able to describe him as one who lived the typical life marked out in their Mysteries. They each described his life according to their own mystical traditions. And if the narratives of the first three Evangelists resemble each other, it proves nothing more than that they drew from similar Mystery traditions. The fourth Evangelist saturated his Gospel with ideas which are, in many respects, reminiscent of the religious philosopher, Philo. This proves only that he was rooted in the same mystical tradition as Philo. There are various elements in the Gospels. First, facts are related, which seem to lay claim to being historical. Secondly, there are parables, in which the narrative form is used only to symbolize a deeper truth. And, thirdly, there are teachings characteristic of the Christian conception of life. In St. John's Gospel there is no real parable. The source from which he drew was a mystical school which considered parables unnecessary. The part played by ostensibly historical facts and parables in the first three Gospels is clearly shown in the narrative of the cursing of the fig tree. In St. Mark's Gospel, XI. I I-i4., we read: "And Jesus entered into Jerusalem and went into the temple: and when he had looked round at everything, and evening had come, he went out to Bethany with the twelve. And on the morrow, when they came from Bethany, lie was hungry: and seeing far off a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, lie found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And he said to it, `May no one eat fruit from you ever again'." In the corresponding passage in St. Luke's Gospel, Jesus relates a parable (XIII. 6, 7) : "A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, `Lo, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and finding none. Cut it down; why should it cumber the ground?' " This is a parable symbolizing the uselessness of the old teaching, represented by the barren fig tree. St. Mark gives the story, meant metaphorically, an appearance of historical fact. We may therefore assume that facts related in the Gospels are generally not to be taken as only historical, or as relevant only to the physical world, but as mystical facts; as experiences which arise from various mystical traditions and can be rightly perceived only through spiritual vision. If we admit this, the difference between the Gospel of St. John and the Synoptic Gospels ceases to exist. For mystical interpretation, historical research need not be taken into account. Even if one or another Gospel were written a few decades earlier or later than the others, for the mystic they are all of equal historical value, St. John's Gospel as well as the others. The "miracles", again, present no difficulty when interpreted mystically. They are supposed to break through the laws of nature. They do so only if they are regarded as events which have so come about on the physical plane, in the perishable world, that ordinary sense-perception could at once grasp them in their entirety. But if they are experiences which can be fathomed only on a higher level of existence, the spiritual, then obviously they cannot be understood by means of the laws of physical nature. It is thus first of all necessary to read the Gospels correctly; then we shall know in what way they are speaking of the Founder of Christianity. Their intention is to narrate his life in the manner used for communications made through the Mysteries-the manner in which a mystic would speak of an initiate. But they treat the initiation as the unique characteristic of a single unique Being. And they make the salvation of humanity depend on holding fast to this uniquely initiated Being. What had come to the initiates was the "kingdom of God". Now a unique Being has brought the kingdom to all who will cleave to Him. What was formerly the personal concern of each individual has become the common concern of all those who are willing to acknowledge Jesus as their Lord. We can understand how this came about if we recognize that the wisdom of the Mysteries was embedded in the popular religion of the Jews. Christianity arose out of Judaism. Hence we need not be surprised at finding engrafted on Judaism, together with Christianity, those mystical ideas which we have seen to be the common property of Greek and Egyptian spiritual life. If we examine popular religions, we find various conceptions of the spiritual; but if in each case we go back to the deeper wisdom of the priests, which proves to be the spiritual nucleus of them all, we find agreement everywhere. Plato knows himself to be in agreement with the priest-sages of Egypt when he is trying to set forth the core of Greek wisdom in his philosophical view of the universe. It is related of Pythagoras that he travelled to Egypt and India, and was instructed by the sages in those countries. Thinkers who lived in the earlier days of Christianity found so much agreement between the philosophical teachings of Plato and the deeper meaning of the Mosaic writings that they called Plato a Moses using the Attic tongue. Mystery wisdom thus existed everywhere. In Judaism it acquired a form which it had to assume if it was to become a world-religion. Judaism expected the Messiah. It is no wonder that when the personality of a unique initiate appeared, the Jews could conceive of him only as the 1\-Zessiah. Indeed, this circumstance throws light on the fact that what had been an individual matter in the Mysteries became an affair of the whole nation. The Jewish religion lead from the beginning been a national religion. The Jewish people looked upon themselves as one organism. Their Jahve was the God of the whole nation. If the Son of this God were to be born, he must be the redeemer of the whole nation. The individual mystic was not to be saved apart from others; the whole nation was to share in the redemption. The idea that one man is to die for all derives from the fundamental thoughts of the Jewish religion. It is also certain that in Judaism there were mysteries which could be brought out of the dimness of a secret cult into the popular religion. A fully-developed mysticism existed side by side with the priestly wisdom attached to the outer formalism of the Pharisees. This mystery wisdom is spoken of among the Jews, just as it is elsewhere. When one day an initiate was speaking of it, and his hearers sensed the secret meaning of his words, they said: "Old man, what have you done? Oh, that you had kept silence! You think to navigate the boundless ocean without sail or mast. That is what you are attempting. Will you fly Upwards? You cannot. Will you descend into the depths? An immeasurable abyss is yawning before you there." And the Kabbalists, from whom this anecdote is taken, speak ,also of four Rabbis. These four Rabbis sought the secret path to the divine. The first died; the second lost his reason; the third brought about fearful devastation; and only the fourth, Rabbi Akaba, entered and returned in peace. So we see that within Judaism also there was a soil in which an initiate of a unique kind could develop. He had only to say to himself: "I will not let salvation be limited to a few chosen people. I will let all people participate in it." He was to carry out into the world at large what the elect had experienced in the temples of the Mysteries. He had to be willing to take upon himself to mediate in spirit to his community, through his personality, that which the cult of the Mysteries had previously brought to those who took part in them. Certainly, he could not at once give to the whole community the experiences of the Mysteries, nor would he have wished to do so. But he wished to give to all the certainty of the truth contemplated in the Mysteries. He wished to cause the life, which flowed within the Mysteries, to flow through the further historical evolution of humanity, and thus to raise mankind to a higher stage of existence. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." He wished to plant unshakably in human hearts, in the form of faith, a certainty that the divine really exists. One who stands outside initiation and has this faith will certainly go further than one who is without it. It must have weighed sorely on the mind of Jesus to think that there might be many standing outside who were not finding the way. He wished to lessen the gulf between those to be initiated and the "people". Christianity was to be a means by which everyone might find the way. If one person or another were not yet ready, he would at any rate not be cut off from the possibility of sharing, more or less unconsciously, in the benefit of the spiritual current flowing through the Mysteries. "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." Those who could not yet share in initiation were to enjoy some of the fruits of the Mysteries. Henceforth the Kingdom of God was not to be dependent on outward ceremonies: "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you." What mattered for Jesus was not so much how far this or that person made progress in the kingdom of the spirit, as that all should be convinced that such a kingdom exists. "In this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven." That is, have confidence in the divine. The time will come when you will find it. ============================= 8 - The Lazarus Miracle Among the "miracles" attributed to Jesus, very special importance must be attached to the raising of Lazarus at Bethany. Everything combines to assign an outstanding place in the New Testament to this episode. We must bear in mind that it is given only by John, the Evangelist who, by the weighty words with which his Gospel opens, asks for it to be interpreted in a particular sense. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God .... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the Son born of the Father alone, full of grace and truth." Anyone who places such words at the beginning of his narrative is plainly indicating that he wishes it to be interpreted in a very deep sense. A reader who approaches it with merely intellectual explanations, or in any other superficial way, is like someone who thinks that Othello on the stage really murders Desdemona. What then is it that St. John means to say in his introductory words? He clearly says that he is speaking of something eternal, which existed at the beginning of things. He relates facts, but they are not to be taken as facts observed by the eye and ear, for logical reason to exercise its skill upon. Behind these facts he conceals the "Word", which is in the Cosmic Spirit. For him, the facts are the medium through which a higher meaning is expressed. We may therefore assume that in the fact of a man being raised from the dead, a fact which offers the greatest difficulties to the eye, ear, and logical reason, the very deepest meaning lies concealed. Another thing has to be taken into consideration. Renan, in his Life of Jesus, suggests that the raising of Lazarus clearly had a decisive influence on the end of the life of Jesus. Yet this idea appears impossible from the point of view that Renan takes. For why should the fact that among the populace the belief was being circulated that Jesus had raised a man from the dead appear to his opponents so dangerous that they asked, "Can Jesus and Judaism exist side by side?" It will not do to assert with Renan: "The other miracles of Jesus were passing events, repeated in good faith and exaggerated by popular report, and they were thought no more of after they had happened. But this one was a real event, publicly known, and by means of which it was sought to silence the Pharisees. All the enemies of Jesus were exasperated by the sensation it caused. It is related that they sought to kill Lazarus." It is incomprehensible why this should be so if Renan were right in his opinion that all that happened at Bethany was the getting up of a mock scene, intended to strengthen belief in Jesus. "Perhaps Lazarus, still pale from his illness, had himself wrapped in a shroud and laid in the family grave. These tombs were large rooms hewn out of the rock, entered by a square opening closed by an immense stone slab. Martha and Mary hastened to meet Jesus, and brought him to the grave before he had entered Bethany. The painful emotion felt by Jesus at the grave of the friend he believed to be dead (John XI. 33, 38) might be taken by those present for the agitation and tremors which were wont to accompany miracles. According to popular belief, divine power in a man was like an epileptic, convulsive force. To continue our hypothesis, Jesus wished to see once more the man he had loved, and, when the slab had been moved away, Lazarus came forth in his grave-clothes, his head bound with a napkin. This apparition was naturally looked upon by everyone as a resurrection. Faith accepts whatever is true for it, and knows no other law." Such an explanation appears absolutely naive, when Renan adds the following opinion: "Everything seems to suggest that the miracle of Bethany contributed essentially to hasten the death of Jesus" An accurate perception does undoubtedly underlie this last assertion; but with the means at his disposal Renan is not able to explain or justify his opinion. Something of quite special importance must have been accomplished by Jesus at Bethany if such words as the following are to be accounted for: "Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, `What are we to do? For this man performs many signs"' (John XI. q.7). Renan, too, surmises that something special occurred. "It must be acknowledged," he says, "that John's narrative is of an essentially different kind from the accounts of miracles of which the Synoptists are full, and which are the outcome of popular imagination. Let us add that John is the only Evangelist with accurate knowledge of the relations of Jesus with the family at Bethany, and that it would be incomprehensible how a creation of the popular mind could have been inserted in the frame of such personal reminiscences. It is probable, therefore, that the miracle in question was not among the wholly legendary ones, for which no one is responsible. In other words, I think that something took place at Bethany which was looked upon as a resurrection." Does not this really mean that Renan surmises that at Bethany something happened which he cannot explain? He entrenches himself behind the words: "At this distance of time, and with only one text bearing obvious traces of subsequent additions, it is impossible to decide whether, in the present case, all is fiction, or whether a real event which took place at Bethany served as the basis of the report that was spread abroad." Are we not dealing here with something which we might come to understand truly merely by reading the text in the right way? In that case, we should perhaps no longer speak of "fiction". It must be admitted that the whole narrative of this event in St. John's Gospel is wrapped in a mysterious veil. To illustrate this, we need mention only one point. If the narrative is to be taken in the literal, physical sense, what can be the meaning of these words of Jesus: "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby"? That is the usual translation of the words, but we come nearer the point if they are rendered: ". . . for the manifestation (revelation) of God, that the Son of God might be revealed thereby." This translation is also correct according to the Greek original. And what do these other words mean: "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live"? (John XI. q., z5). It would be a triviality to suppose that Jesus meant to say that Lazarus had become ill only in order that Jesus might demonstrate his skill through him. And it would again be a triviality to think that Jesus meant to assert that faith in him brings back to life someone who in the ordinary sense is dead. What would there be remarkable about a person who has risen from the dead if after his resurrection he were the same as he was before dying? Indeed, what would it mean to describe the life of such a person in the words, "I am the resurrection and the life" ? The words of Jesus come to life and make sense directly we understand them as the expression of a spiritual occurrence, and even take them in a certain way literally as they stand in the text. Jesus says that he is the resurrection that has happened to Lazarus, and that he is the life that Lazarus is living. Let us take literally what Jesus is, according to St. John's Gospel. He is "the Word that was made flesh". He is the Eternal that existed in the beginning. If he is really the resurrection, then the Eternal, the Primordial, has risen again in Lazarus. We are concerned, therefore, with a resurrection of the eternal "Word", and this "Word" is the life to which Lazarus has been raised. His "illness" is one that leads not to death, but to the glory-the revelation-of God. If the eternal Word has reawakened in Lazarus, the whole process serves to make God manifest in Lazarus. For through it Lazarus has become a different man. Before it, the Word, the Spirit, did not live in him; now it does. The Spirit has been born within him. It is true that every birth is accompanied by illness, that of the mother, but the illness leads to new life, not to death. In Lazarus that part of him becomes ill from which the "new man", permeated by the "Word", is born. Where is the grave from which the "Word" is born? To answer this question we have only to remember Plato, who calls man's body the tomb of the soul. And we have only to recall Plato's speaking of a kind of resurrection when he alludes to the coming to life of the spiritual world in the body. What Plato calls the spiritual soul, John designates as the "Word". And for him, Christ is the "Word". Plato might have said, "Whoever becomes spiritual has caused something divine to rise out of the grave of his body". For St. John, that which took place through the life of Jesus is this resurrection. It is no wonder that he makes Jesus say, "I am the resurrection". There can be no doubt that the occurrence at Bethany was an awakening in the spiritual sense. Lazarus became a different person. He was raised to a life of which the Eternal Word could say, "I am this life". What, then, took place in Lazarus? The Spirit came to life within him. He became a partaker of the life which is eternal. We have only to express his experience in the words of those who were initiated into the Mysteries, and the meaning at once becomes clear. What does Plutarch say about the purpose of the Mysteries? They were designed to withdraw the soul from bodily life and to unite it with the gods. Schelling thus describes the feelings of an initiate: "The initiate, through the consecration he received, became a link in the magic chain; he himself became a Kabir. He was admitted into an indestructible relationship and, as ancient inscriptions express it, joined the army of the higher gods" (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung). And the revolution that took place in the life of one who received initiation cannot be more significantly described than in the words spoken by Aedesius to his disciple, the Emperor Constantine: "If one day you should take part in the Mysteries, you will feel ashamed of having been born merely as a man." If we fill our souls with such feelings as these, we shall gain the right attitude towards the event at Bethany; and we shall then experience something quite special through St. John's narrative. A certainty will dawn upon us which no logical interpretation or any attempt at a rationalistic explanation can provide. A mystery in the true sense of the word is before us. The "Eternal Word" entered into Lazarus. In the language of the Mysteries, he became an initiate, and the event narrated for us must be an act of initiation. Let us look upon the whole occurrence as though it were an initiation. Lazarus is loved by Jesus (John XI. 36). No ordinary affection can be meant by this, for it would be contrary to the spirit of John's Gospel, in which Jesus is the "Word". Jesus loved Lazarus because he found him ripe for the awakening of the "Word" within him. Jesus had connections with the family at Bethany. This means only that Jesus had made everything ready in that family for the final act of the drama, the raising of Lazarus. Lazarus was a pupil of Jesus, a pupil such that Jesus could be quite sure that in him the awakening would be consummated. The final act in a drama of awakening consisted in a symbolical action which revealed the spirit. The person concerned had not only to understand the words, "Die and become!" He had to fulfil them himself by a real spiritual action. His earthly part, of which his higher being in the sense of the Mysteries must be ashamed, had to be laid aside. The earthly part had to die a symbolically real death. The putting of his body into a somnambulistic sleep for three days, contrasted with the preceding great transformation of his life, can be regarded only as an external event to which an incomparably more significant spiritual event corresponded. But this very process was indeed also the experience which divides the life of a mystic into two parts. Anyone who does not know from experience the inner significance of such acts cannot understand them. They can only be suggested by means of a comparison. The substance of Shakespeare's Hamlet can be compressed into a few words. Anyone who learns these words may say that in a certain sense he knows the content of Hamlet: and logically he does. But anyone who has let all the wealth of Shakespeare's treatment stream in upon him knows Hamlet in a different way. Through his soul has passed a life-drama which no mere description can replace. The idea of Hamlet has become for him an artistic, personal experience. On a higher level a similar process takes place in man when he experiences the magically significant event which is bound up with initiation. What he attains spiritually, he lives through symbolically. The word "symbolically" is used here in the sense that while an outer event is really enacted on the physical plane, it is nevertheless a symbol. We have to do with a real symbol, not an imaginary one. The earthly body has really been dead for three days. New life comes forth from death. This life has outlived death. Man has gained trust in the new life. So it happened with Lazarus. Jesus had prepared him for the awakening. His illness was at once symbolic and real; and this illness was in fact an initiation which leads, after three days, to a really new life.* Lazarus was ripe to accomplish this procedure. He wrapped himself in the garment of a mystic, and fell into a condition of lifelessness which was symbolic death. And when Jesus came, the three days had elapsed. "Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, `Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me"' (John XI. 4t). The Father had heard Jesus, for Lazarus had come to the final act in the great drama of the achievement of knowledge. He had come to know how resurrection is attained. An initiation into the Mysteries had been consummated. It was an initiation such as had been understood throughout antiquity. It had been accomplished through Jesus as the initiator. Union with the divine had always been conceived of in this way. --------------------- Notes: *This description relates to the old initiations, which did indeed require the candidate to remain in a sleep-like condition for three days. No genuine modern initiation requires this. On the contrary, it leads to an enhanced state of consciousness, and ordinary consciousness is never dimmed during the initiation drama. --------------------- In Lazarus, Jesus accomplished the great miracle of the transmutation of life in the sense of immemorial tradition. Through this event, Christianity is connected with the Mysteries. Lazarus had become an initiate through Christ Jesus Himself, and was thereby made fit to enter the higher worlds. He was both the first Christian initiate and the first to be initiated by Christ Jesus Himself. Through his initiation lie had become capable of recognizing that the "Word" which had been awakened within him had become a person in Christ Jesus, and that accordingly there stood before him, in the person of his awakener, the same power which had been spiritually manifested within him. From this point of view, these words of Jesus are significant: "And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people who stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me" (John XI, 4z). These words are meant to show that in Jesus the "Son of the Father" lives in such a way that when he awakens his own being in a man, the man becomes a mystic. So Jesus made it plain that the meaning of life was hidden in the Mysteries and that they opened the way to this meaning. He is the living Word; in him an ancient tradition was personified. And so the Evangelist is justified in expressing this in the sentence, "in him the Word was made flesh". He rightly sees in Jesus himself an incarnate Mystery. On this account, John's Gospel is a Mystery. In order to read it rightly, we must bear in mind that the facts are spiritual facts. If a priest of the old order had written it, he would have described traditional rites. These, for John, took the form of a person, and became the "life of Jesus". An eminent modern investigator of the Mysteries, Burkhardt in Die Zeit Konstantins, says that they "will never be cleared up". This is because he has not found out how to explain them. If we take the Gospel of St. John and see in it the working out, in a reality that is both symbolic and corporeal, the drama of the achievement of knowledge enacted by the ancients, we are gazing upon the Mystery itself. In the words, "Lazarus, come forth," we can recognize the call with which the Egyptian priestly initiators summoned back to everyday life those who had undergone the process of initiation, which had temporarily withdrawn them from the world in order that they might die to earthly things and gain a conviction of the reality of the eternal. In this way Jesus revealed the secret of the Mysteries. It is easy to understand that the Jews could not let such an act go unpunished, any more than the Greeks could have refrained from punishing Aeschylus, if lie had betrayed the secrets of the Mysteries. For Jesus, the main point was to present the initiation of Lazarus before all "the people who stand by", thus making public an event which in the old days of priestly wisdom could be enacted only in the secrecy of the Mysteries. The initiation of Lazarus was to prepare the way for an understanding of the "Mystery of Golgotha". Previously only those who "saw"-that is, who were initiated-were able to know something of what was achieved by initiation; but now a conviction of the secrets of higher worlds could be gained also by those who "have not seen, and yet have believed". ============================= 9 - The Apocalypse of John At the end of the New Testament stands a remarkable document, the Apocalypse, the secret Revelation of St. John. We have only to read the opening words to feel the deeply esoteric character of this book. "The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God granted him to show his servants how the necessary events will shortly run their course; this is sent in signs by the angel of God to his servant John." What is here revealed is "sent in signs". Therefore we must not take the literal meaning of the words as they stand, but seek for a deeper meaning of which the words are only signs. But there are many other things also which point to a hidden meaning. St. John addresses himself to the seven churches in Asia. This cannot mean actual congregations. For the number seven is the sacred number, which must have been chosen on account of its symbolic meaning. The actual number of the Asiatic congregations will have been different. And the way in which St. John arrived at the revelation also points to something mysterious. "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a voice like a trumpet saying: What you see, write in a book, and send it to the seven communities." Thus we have to do with a revelation received by St. John in the spirit. And it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. That which was made manifest to the world through Christ Jesus is presented here in an esoteric form. Therefore we must look for this hidden meaning in the teachings of Christ. This revelation has the same relation to ordinary Christianity as the revelation of the Mysteries, in pre-Christian times, had to popular religion. Hence the attempt to treat the Apocalypse as a Mystery appears to be justified. The Apocalypse is addressed to seven communities. To see what is meant by this, we need only single out one of the seven messages. The first message says: "To the angel of the community in Ephesus write: The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand; who walks in the midst of the seven golden lights. I know your deeds and what you have suffered and also your patient endurance, and that you will not support those who are evil, and that you have called to account those who call themselves apostles, and are not, and that you have recognized them as false. And you are enduring patiently and building up your work upon my name, and you have not grown weary of it. But I demand from you that you should attain to your highest love. Realize then from what you have fallen, change your thinking and accomplish the highest deeds. If you do not, I will come and move your light from its place, unless you change your thinking. But this you have, that you despise the deeds of the Nicolaitians, which I also despise. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the communities: To him who is victorious I will give food of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God." That is the message addressed to the angel of the first community. The angel, who represents the spirit of the community, has entered upon the path pointed out by Christianity. he is able to distinguish between the false adherents of Christianity and the true. He wishes to be Christian, and has founded his work on the name of Christ. But it is required of him that he should not bar his own way to the highest love by errors of any kind. He is shown the possibility of taking a wrong course through such errors. Through Christ Jesus the way for attaining to the divine has been pointed out. Perseverance is needed for advancing further in the sense of the original impulse. It is possible to believe too soon that one has grasped the right sense. This happens when someone lets himself be led a short way by Christ and then leaves this leadership by giving way to false ideas about it. He then falls back into his lower self. He has lcft his "highest love". The knowledge derived from the senses and intellect may be raised into a higher sphere, becoming wisdom by being spiritualized and made divine. If it does not reach this height, it remains among perishable things. Christ Jesus has pointed out the path to the Eternal, and knowledge must pursue with unwearied perseverance the path that leads to its becoming divine. Lovingly it must follow the steps which transmute it into wisdom. The Nicolaitians were a sect who took Christianity too lightly. They saw one thing only: Christ is the Divine Word, the Eternal Wisdom, which is born in man. Therefore they concluded that human wisdom is the Divine Word, and that it was enough to pursue human knowledge in order to realize the divine in the world. But the meaning of Christian wisdom cannot be construed in this way. The knowledge which begins as human wisdom is as perishable as anything else, unless it is first transmuted into divine wisdom. Thou art not thus, says the "Spirit" to the angel of Ephesus. Thou hast not relied merely upon human wisdom. Thou hast patiently trodden the Christian path. But thou must remember that the very highest love is needed to reach the goal. It must be a love which far surpasses all love for other things. Only this can be the "highest" love. The path to the divine is an infinite one, and it must be understood that when the first step has been gained, it can be the preparation for ascending higher and higher. This rendering of the first of these messages will show how they are to be interpreted. The meaning of the others may be found in a similar way. John turned and saw "seven golden lights", and "in the midst of the lights the image of the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his loins; his head and his hair were gleaming white like wool or snow, and his eyes were sparkling in the fire". We are told (I. 20) that "the seven lights are the seven communities". This means that the lights are seven different ways of attaining to the divine. They are all more or less imperfect. And the Son of Man "had in his right hand seven stars" (I. i6). The seven stars are the angels of the seven communities (I. 20). The guiding spirits, or daimons, of the wisdom of the Mysteries have become the guiding angels of the communities. The communities are represented as bodies for spiritual beings, and the angels are the souls of these bodies, just as human souls are the guiding powers of human bodies. The communities are the ways to the divine at an imperfect stage; and the souls of the communities ought to become guides along those paths. For this purpose they must themselves come to have for their leader the being who has in his right hand seven stars. "And out of his mouth issued a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance in its glory was like the shining sun." This sword is found also in the Mysteries. The candidate for initiation was terrified by a flashing sword. This indicates the situation of one who wishes to know the divine by experience, so that the countenance of wisdom may shine upon him like the sun. St. John also goes through this experience. It is to be a test of his strength. "And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying: Fear not" (I. i7). The candidate for initiation must pass through the experiences which otherwise come to man only when he goes through the gate of death. His guide must lead him beyond the region in which birth and death have meaning. The initiate enters upon a new life. "And I was dead, and behold, I became alive throughout the cycles of life, and I have the keys of Death and of the Realm of the Dead." Thus prepared, St. John is led on to learn the secrets of existence. "Ater this I looked, and behold, the door to heaven was opened: and the first voice I heard was as it were of a trumpet, and it said: Come up hither, and I will shew you things which must be hereafter." The messages to the seven spirits of the churches make known to St. John what is to take place in the physical world in order to prepare the way for Christianity. What he now sees "in the spirit" leads him to the spiritual fountain-head of things, which is hidden behind physical evolution but will be brought about as a spiritualized age, in the near future, by means of physical evolution. The initiate experiences now in the spirit what is to happen in the future. "And immediately I was withdrawn into the realm of the Spirit. And I beheld a throne in heaven, and one seated on the throne. And he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian; and round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald." In this way the source of things in the world of sense is described in terms of the pictures which it assumes for the seer. "And in the sphere around the throne were twentyfour thrones, and seated upon the twenty-four thrones were twenty-four elders, clothed in white flowing garments, and with golden crowns upon their heads." (IV. r, z). Beings far advanced upon the path of wisdom thus surround the primal source of existence, to gaze on its infinite essence and to bear testimony to it. "And in the midst of the throne, and around the throne, were four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind. And the first living creature was like a lion, and the second like a bull; the third looked like a human being, and the fourth was like a flying eagle. And each of the four living creatures had six wings, full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to proclaim: Holy, holy, holy, God the Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come." It is not difficult to see that the four living creatures represent the supersensible life which underlies the forms of life in the physical world. Afterwards, when the trumpets sound, they lift up their voices: that is, when the life expressed in material forms has been transmuted into spiritual life. In the right hand of him who sits on the throne is the book in which the path to the highest wisdom is marked out (V. 1). One only is worthy to open the book. "Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book and to loose the seven seals thereof." The book has seven seals. Human wisdom is sevenfold. This designation is again connected with the sacred character of the number seven. The mystical wisdom of Philo designates as seals the eternal cosmic thoughts which come to expression in things. Human wisdom seeks for those creative thoughts; but only in the book sealed with them is divine truth to be found. The fundamental thoughts of creation must first be unveiled, the seals must be opened, before what is in the book can be revealed. Jesus, the Lion, has power to open the seals. He has given to the great creative thoughts a direction which leads, through them, to wisdom. The Lamb that was slain and gave its blood as a sacrifice to God; Jesus, who became the bearer of the Christ and thus, in the highest sense, passed through the Mystery of life and death, opens the book (V. g, r o) . And as each seal is opened, the four living creatures declare what they know. At the opening of the first seal, John sees a white horse, on which sits a rider with a bow. The first universal power, an embodiment of creative thought, becomes visible. It is set on the right course by the new rider, Christianity. Strife is allayed by the new faith. At the opening of the second seal a red horse appears. Its rider takes away peace, the second cosmic power, from the earth, so that humanity may not neglect, through sloth, to cultivate the divine. The opening of the third seal discloses the universal power of justice, guided by Christianity. The fourth reveals the power of religion which, through Christianity, has received new dignity. The meaning of the four living creatures thus becomes plain. They are the four chief cosmic powers, which are to receive new leadership through Christianity: War (the lion); Peaceful Work (the bull); Justice (the being with the human face); and Religious Enthusiasm (the eagle). The meaning of the third being becomes clear when it is said at the opening of the third seal: "A quart of wheat for a shilling, and three quarts of barley for a shilling", and that on this account the rider holds a pair of scales. And at the opening of the fourth seal a rider becomes visible whose "name was Death, and Hell followed after him". This rider is Religious Justice (VI. 6, 8). When the fifth seal is opened, the souls of those who have already acted in the spirit of Christianity appear. Creative thought itself, embodied in Christianity, shows itself here; but by this Christianity is at first meant only the first Christian community, which is transitory like other forms of creation. The sixth seal is opened (VI); it is made evident that the spiritual world of Christianity is an eternal world. The people seem to be permeated by that spiritual world out of which Christianity itself proceeded. What it has itself created becomes sanctified. "And I heard the number of those who were sealed: one hundred and forty-four thousand were sealed out of all the tribes of the children of Israel" (VII. q.). They are those who prepared for the eternal before the coming of Christianity, and were transformed by the Christ-impulse. The opening of the seventh seal follows. What true Christianity should mean for the world becomes evident. The seven angels, "who stand before God", appear (VIII. z.) Again, these angels are spirits from the ancient Mysteries transferred to Christianity. They are the spirits who lead to the vision of God in a truly Christian way. Therefore the next stage to be accomplished is itself a leading to God: it is an "initiation" which is bestowed upon John. The proclamations by the angels are accomplished by the signs necessary during initiations. "The first angel sounded and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they fell upon the earth: and a third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees, and all the green grass was burnt up." And similar events take place when the other angels sound their trumpets. At this point we see that this was not merely an initiation in the old sense, but that a new initiation was to replace the old. Christianity was not to be confined, as were the ancient Mysteries, to a few elect: it was to belong to the whole of humanity. It was to be a religion of the people; the truth was to be available for each one who "has ears to hear". The old mystics were singled out from a great number; the trumpets of Christianity sound for every one who is willing to hear them. Whether or not he draws near depends on himself. That is why the terrors accompanying this initiation of humanity are so enormously enhanced. What is to become of the earth and its inhabitants in a far distant future is revealed to St. John at his initiation. Underlying this is the thought that initiates are able to foresee in higher worlds what is realized in the lower world only in the future. The seven messages indicate the meaning of Christianity for the present age; the seven seals indicate what is now being prepared through Christianity for consummation in the future. The future is veiled and sealed for the uninitiated; it is unsealed in initiation. After the close of the earthly period, during which the seven messages hold good, a more spiritual time will begin. Then life will no longer flow on under the guise of physical shapes, but even outwardly it will be a copy of its supersensible forms. These latter are represented by the four animals and the other images connected with the seals. In a still later future appears that form of the earth which the initiate experiences through the trumpets. Thus the initiate prophetically experiences what is to happen. And the Christian initiate learns how the Christimpulse strikes into and works on in earthly evolution. After it has been shown how death will come to everything that through its attachment to the transitory fails to attain true Christianity, there appears the mighty angel holding open in his hand a little scroll, which he gives to John. "And he said to me: Take it, and eat; it will be bitter in your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth." (10:9). John was not only to read the little scroll; he was to absorb it, letting its contents permeate him. What avails any knowledge unless a man is vitally and thoroughly permeated by it? Wisdom has to become life; man should not merely recognize the divine, but become divine himself. Such wisdom as is written in the book will no doubt cause pain to the perishable part of man-"it will be bitter in your stomach"-but so much the more does it make happy the eternal part-"it will be sweet as honey in your mouth". Only through such an initiation can Christianity become actual on the earth. It kills everything belonging to the lower nature. "And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified." By this is meant the followers of Christ, who are ill-treated by the temporal powers. But the ill-treatment applies only to the transitory parts of human nature, which these followers, in their true being, will have overcome. Thereby their fate is a reflection of the exemplary fate of Christ Jesus. The city called "Sodom and Egypt" is the symbol of a life which cleaves to the external and is not changed by the Christ-impulse. Christ is everywhere crucified in the lower nature. When this lower nature conquers, everything remains dead. The dead bodies of men lie about in the public places of cities. Those who overcome the lower nature and awaken the crucified Christ hear the trumpet of the seventh angel: "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ, and he shall reign from cosmic age to cosmic age." (11:15). "And God's temple in heaven was opened, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his covenant." (11:19). In his vision of these events the initiate sees renewed the old struggle between the lower and the higher natures. For everything which the candidate for initiation formerly had to go through must be repeated in one who follows the Christian path. Just as Osiris was threatened by the evil Typhon, so now "the great dragon, that old serpent" (12:9,) must be overcome. The woman, the human soul, gives birth to lower knowledge, which is an adverse power if it is not raised to wisdom. Man must pass through this lower knowledge. In the Apocalypse it appears as the "old serpent". In all mystical wisdom from the remotest times the serpent has been the symbol of knowledge. Man may be led astray by this serpent-knowledge-if he does not bring to life in himself the Son of God, who crushes the serpent's head. "And the great Dragon was thrown out, that old Serpent whose name is Devil, and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world: he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him." (12:9). In these words we can see what it was that Christianity wished to be: a new kind of initiation. What had been attained in the Mysteries was to be attained in a new form. For in them too the serpent had to be overcome, but this was no longer to take place in the old way. The one, archetypal Mystery, the Christian Mystery, was to replace the many Mysteries of antiquity. Jesus, in whom the Logos had been made flesh, was to become the Initiator of the whole of humanity, and this humanity was to be his own community of mystics-not a separation of the elect, but a linking together of all. Each person is enabled to become a mystic, according to his degree of maturity. The good tidings are announced to all; he who has an ear to hear hastens to learn the secrets. In each individual case the voice of the heart is to decide. No longer is one person at a time to be introduced into the Mystery temples, but the word is to be spoken to all; one person will hear it more clearly, or less clearly, than another. It will be left to the daimon, the angel within each human breast, to decide how far a person can be initiated. The whole world is a Mystery temple. Blessedness is not to come only to those who see the wonderful ceremonies in the special temples for initiation-ceremonies which give them proof of the eternal-but "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed". Even if at first they grope in the dark, the light may yet come to them later. Nothing is to be withheld from anyone; the way is to be open to all. The later part of the Apocalypse describes graphically the dangers threatening Christianity through anti-Christian powers, and the final triumph of Christianity. All other gods are absorbed in the one Christian Divinity: "And the city has no need of the sun or moon to shine upon it; for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb". (21:23.) The mystery of the Revelation of John is that the Mysteries are no longer to be kept under lock and key. "And he said to me: `Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, for the Godhead is near'." The author of the Apocalypse has set forth what he believes to be the relation of his church to the churches of antiquity. He wished to express in a spiritual mystery his view of the Mysteries themselves. He wrote his mystery on the isle of Patmos, and is said to have received the "Revelation" in a grotto. These details indicate that the revelation had the character of a Mystery. Thus Christianity arose out of the Mysteries. Its wisdom is born as a mystery in the Apocalypse, but a mystery which transcends the limits of the old mystery world. The one unique Mystery was to become a universal Mystery. It may appear to be a contradiction to say that the secrets of the Mysteries became manifest through Christianity, and that nevertheless a Christian mystery is to be seen again in the spiritual visions of the writer of the Apocalypse. The contradiction disappears directly we reflect that the secrets of the ancient Mysteries were revealed through the events in Palestine. These events brought out into the light what had previously been veiled in the Mysteries. A new Mystery has now been introduced into the evolution of the world through the appearance of Christ. The initiate of ancient times experienced in the spiritual world how evolution points the way to the as yet "hidden Christ". The Christian initiate experiences the hidden effects of "Christ revealed". ============================= 10 - Jesus and His Historical Background In the wisdom of the Mysteries is to be sought the soil out of which grew the spirit of Christianity. All that was needed was that a fundamental conviction should gain ground-the conviction that the spirit of Christianity must be introduced into life in greater measure than had come about through the Mysteries. But such a conviction was already present in many circles, as may be seem from the way of life of the Essenes and Therapeutae, who existed long before Christianity arose. The Essenes were a closed Palestinian sect, with an estimated membership of about 4,000 at the time of Christ. Their community required its members to lead a life which developed a higher life within the soul and so brought about a new birth. The aspirant was subjected to a severe test in order to ascertain whether he was mature enough to prepare himself for a higher life. If he was admitted, he had to undergo a period of probation. He had to take a solemn oath that he would not betray to strangers the secrets of the discipline. Its object was the conquest of the lower nature in man, so that the spirit slumbering within him might be awakened ever more and more. Whoever had experienced up to a certain stage the spirit within him was raised to a higher grade and enjoyed a corresponding degree of authority, not enforced from without, but conditioned by fundamental convictions. Akin to the Essenes were the Therapeutae, who lived in Egypt. All the relevant details of their mode of life are given in a treatise by the philosopher Philo, On the Contemplative Life. (The dispute as to the authenticity of this work must now be regarded as settled, and it may be rightly assumed that Philo really described the life of a community existing long before Christianity, and well known to him. See G. R. Mead's Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, 1902). A few passages from Philo's treatise will give an idea of the main tenets of the Therapeutae: "The dwellings of the members of the community are extremely simple, affording only necessary protection against extreme heat and cold. The dwellings are not built close together, as in towns, for contiguity has no attraction for anyone who is seeking solitude; nor are they far apart, in order that the fellowship so dear to them may not be hampered, and so that they may be easily able to render assistance to each other in the event of an attack by brigands. In each house is a consecrated space, a small room or cell called a sanctuary or monasterion, where the mysteries of the higher life are cultivated .... They also possess works by ancient authors who once led their school, and left behind many explanations about the customary method used in allegorical writings .... Their interpretation of sacred writings is directed to the deeper meaning of allegorical narratives." Thus we see that what had been striven for in the narrower circle of the Mysteries had become the concern of a community, but its strict character was naturally weakened by this widening out. The communities of Essenes and Therapeutae form a natural transition from the Mysteries to Christianity. But Christianity wished to extend to humanity what had been the affair of a sect. This naturally prepared the way for a further weakening of the old strict forms. From the existence of such secret sects we can see how far the time was ripe for a comprehension of the mystery of Christ. In the Mysteries, a man was prepared by special methods so that at the appropriate stage the higher spiritual world would arise in his soul. Within the communities of the Essenes and Therapeutae the soul sought, by a certain mode of life, to become ripe for the awakening of the "higher man". A further step then is to struggle through to an intimation that a human individuality may have evolved to higher and higher stages of perfection in the course of repeated lives on earth. Anyone who had arrived at a glimpse of this truth would be able to feel that in Jesus a being of lofty spirituality had appeared. The higher the spirituality, the greater the possibility of accomplishing something important. Thus the individuality of Jesus could become capable of accomplishing the deed which the Gospels so mysteriously indicate in the Baptism by John, speaking of it in a way which clearly points to it as of the utmost significance. The personality of Jesus became able to receive into its own soul Christ, the Logos, who was made flesh in that soul. Thenceforward the "Ego" of Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, and the outer personality was the vehicle of the Logos. The event of the Ego" of Jesus becoming Christ is enacted in the Baptism by St. John. During the period of the Mysteries, "union with the Spirit" was only for the few who were initiated. With the Essenes, a whole community cultivated a life by means of which its members could arrive at this "union". Through the Christ event, something-the very deeds of Christ-was placed before the whole of humanity, so that the "union" became a way of knowledge open to all mankind. ============================= 11 - The Nature of Christianity A profound effect must have been produced upon those who acknowledged Christianity by the fact that the Divine, the Word, the eternal Logos, no longer met them in the twilight secrecy of the Mysteries, as Spirit only, but that in speaking of the Logos they were led to think of the historical, human personality of Jesus. Previously, the Logos had been discernible in the world only through degrees of human perfection. The delicate, subtle differences in the spiritual life of a personality could be observed, and the manner and degree in which the Logos became living in those individuals who were seeking initiation. A higher degree of maturity was to be interpreted as a higher stage in the evolution of spiritual life. The preparatory steps had to be sought in a past spiritual life, and the present life was to be regarded as the preparatory stage for future stages of spiritual evolution. The conservation of the spiritual power of the soul and the eternal character of that power could be stated in the sense of Jewish esoteric teaching in the zohar: "Nothing in the world is lost; nothing falls into the void, not even the words and voice of man; everything has its place and purpose." Personality was but a metamorphosis of the soul, which changes from one personality to another. The single life of a personality was regarded only as a link in the chain of development stretching backwards and forwards. Through Christianity, the self-transforming Logos was led away from separate personalities and focused on the unique personality of Jesus. That which had previously been distributed throughout the world was now brought together in a single personality. Jesus became the unique God-Man. In Jesus there was present once and for all something which must appear to man as the greatest of ideals, with which, in the course of repeated earthly lives, he ought to unite himself more and more closely. Jesus took upon himself the task of raising all humanity to the divine. In Him was sought what formerly could be sought only in a man's own soul. The divine, eternal element which had always been found in the soul had been taken from it; all this eternal element could now be seen in Jesus. It is no longer the eternal part of the soul that conquers death and is raised through its own power as divine, but the one God who was in Jesus will appear and raise the souls. An entirely new meaning was thus given to personality. The eternal, immortal part had been taken from it. Only the personality as such was left. If eternity were not to be denied, immortality had to be ascribed to the personality itself. Out of the belief in the soul's eternal metamorphosis came the belief in personal immortality. The personality acquired infinite importance because it was the only thing left for man to hold on to. Henceforth there is nothing between the personality and the infinite God. A direct relation with Him must be established. Man was no longer capable of himself becoming divine, to a greater or lesser degree. He was simply man, standing in a direct but outward relation to God. Those who knew the outlook that had prevailed in the old Mysteries were bound to feel that a quite new note had been brought into the conception of the world. Many people were in this position during the first centuries of Christianity. They knew the nature of the Mysteries. If they wished to become Christians, they were obliged to come to terms with the old outlook. This led to the most difficult conflicts in their souls. They tried in the most varied ways to reconcile these two divergent conceptions of the world. This conflict is reflected in the writings of early Christian times: in those of pagans attracted by the sublimity of Christianity and in those of Christians who found it hard to give up the ways of the Mysteries. Christianity grew slowly from out of these Mysteries. On the one hand, Christian convictions were presented in the form of Mystery truths; on the other, the Mystery wisdom was clothed in Christian words. Clement of Alexandria (d. A.D. 2I7), a Christian writer whose education had been pagan, is an instance of this. In his Stromata, Book 1, Chapter r, he writes: "Thus the Lord did not hinder us from doing good while keeping the Sabbath, but allowed us to communicate of those divine mysteries, and of that holy light, to those who were able to receive them. He did not disclose to the many what did not belong to the many; but he disclosed it only to the few for whom he judged it fitting, those who were able to grasp it and to model themselves on it; for God entrusted the unutterable mystery to the Logos, not to the written word .... God set some in the Church as apostles, others as prophets, others as Evangelists and others as pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." In those days individuals sought by the most diverse means to find the way from the ancient conceptions to the Christian ones. And a person who thought he was on the right path called the others heretics. In the meanwhile the Church grew stronger and stronger as an external institution. The more power it gained, the more did the path recognized by the decisions of councils as the right one take the place of personal investigation. It was for the Church to decide who deviated too far from the divine truth she guarded. The idea of a "heretic" took firmer and firmer shape. During the first centuries of Christianity the search for the divine path was a much more personal matter than it afterwards became. A long road had to be travelled before Augustine could declare: "I should not believe in the truth of the Gospels if I were not constrained to do so by the authority of the Catholic Church". The conflict between the method of the Mysteries and that of the Christian religion acquired a special stamp through the various Gnostic sects and writers. We may class as Gnostics all the writers of the first Christian centuries who sought for a deeper spiritual meaning in Christian teachings. (A brilliant account of the development of the Gnosis is given in G. R. S. Mead's book, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, mentioned above.) We understand the Gnostics when we look on them as saturated with the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries and striving to understand Christianity from that point of view. For them, Christ is the Logos. Above all, therefore, He is of a spiritual nature. In His primal essence He cannot approach man from without. He must be awakened in the soul. But the historical Jesus must bear some relation to the spiritual Logos. That was the crucial question for the Gnostics. Some settled it in one way, some in another. The essential point common to them all was that to arrive at a true understanding of the Christ-idea, mere historical tradition was not enough. A true understanding must be sought either in the wisdom of the Mysteries or in the Neoplatonic philosophy which sprang from the same source. The Gnostics had confidence in human wisdom and believed it capable of bringing forth a Christ by whom the historical Christ could be measured: only through the former, in fact, could the latter be understood and beheld in the right light. Of special interest from this point of view is the doctrine set forth in the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. Certainly, there is no mention of these books until the sixth century; but when and where they were written is of small account. The point is that they give an account of Christianity which is clothed in the language of Neoplatonic philosophy and presented in the form of a spiritual vision of the higher world. In any event this mode of presentation belongs to the first Christian centuries. It replaced the oral tradition of earlier times, for the most important things were not then entrusted to writing. The Christianity of Dionysius can be regarded as reflected in the mirror of the Neoplatonic conception of the world. Sense-perception obscures man's spiritual vision. He must reach out beyond the sense-perceptible world. But all human ideas are derived in the first instance from observation by the senses. What man perceives with his senses, he calls existent; whatever he does not perceive in this way, he calls non-existent. Therefore, if he wishes to bring within his reach an actual view of the divine, he must rise above existence and non-existence, for both these, as he conceives them, have their origin in the realm of the senses. It follows that God is neither existent nor non-existent; He is superexistent. Hence He cannot be attained by means of ordinary cognition, which has to do with existent things. We have to be raised above ourselves, above sense-observation, above logical reasoning, if we are to find our way to spiritual vision; then we are able to gain a glimpse into the vistas of the divine. But this super-existent Deity has brought forth the Logos, the wisdom-filled ground of the world. To Him man's lower powers are able to attain. He is present in the system of the world as the spiritual Son of God; He is the mediator between God and man. He may be present in varying degrees. He may, for instance, be realised in an external institution, where those diversely imbued with his spirit are grouped in a hierarchy. A "Church" of this kind is the outer reality of the Logos, and the power which lives in it lived personally in the Christ become flesh, in Jesus. Thus the Church is united to God through Jesus; in Him lies its meaning and its crowning-point. One thing was clear to all Gnosis: the need to come to terms with the idea of Jesus as a personality. Christ and Jesus must be brought into relationship with one another. Divinity was taken away from human personality, and in one way or another must be recovered. To find it again in Jesus must be possible. The mystic had to do with a degree of divinity within himself, and with his own earthly personality. The Christian had to do with the latter, and also with a perfect God, far above everything humanly attainable. If we hold firmly to this point of view, a fundamentally mystical attitude of the soul is possible only when, through having found the higher spiritual element in itself, its spiritual eye is opened so that the light issuing from Christ in Jesus falls upon it. The union of the soul with its highest powers is at the same time union with the historical Christ. For mysticism is an immediate feeling and perceptive experience of the divine within the soul. But a God transcending everything human can never dwell in the soul in any real sense of the word. The Gnosis and all subsequent mysticism represent the effort to lay hold of that God in one way or another, and to apprehend Him directly in the soul. A conflict here was inevitable. In reality it was possible for man to find only his own divine part; but this is both divine and human, the divine at a certain stage of development. Yet the Christian God is a definite Being, perfect in Himself. It was possible for a person to find in himself the power to strive upwards to this God, but he could not say that what he experienced in his own soul, at any stage of development, was one with God. A gulf arose between what could be known in the soul and what Christianity called divine. It is the gulf between knowledge and belief, between cognition and religious feeling. This gulf does not exist for a mystic in the old sense of the word. For he knows with certainty that he can comprehend the divine only by degrees, and he also knows why this is so. It is clear to him that this gradual attainment involves a real attainment of true, living divinity, and he finds it difficult to speak of a perfect, isolated divine principle. A mystic of this kind does not wish to apprehend a perfect God, but he wishes to experience the divine life. He wishes to become divine, not to gain an external relation to the Godhead. It is of the essence of Christianity that its mysticism is not in this sense free from all prior assumptions. The Christian mystic seeks to behold the divinity within himself, but he is bound to look to the historical Christ as his physical eyes look to the sun. Just as the physical eye says to itself, "By means of the sun I see what I have power to see", so the Christian mystic says to himself, "I will raise my inner being towards the divine vision, but the light which makes this vision possible is given in the Christ who has appeared on earth. He is, and through this I am enabled to rise to the highest within myself". Here the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages show how they differ from the mystics of the ancient Mysteries. (cf. my book, Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens, Berlin, 1901; Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, New Jersey, 1960). ============================= 12 - Christianity and Pagan Wisdom At the time of the first beginnings of Christianity, the old pagan culture gave rise to certain conceptions of the world which seem to be a continuation of the Platonic philosophy, and can also be taken as a deepening and spiritualization of the wisdom of the Mysteries. They emerge first with Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.-A.D- 50). From his point of view the processes which lead to the divine take place in the innermost part of the human soul. One might say that the temple in which Philo seeks initiation is simply and solely his own inward life and the higher experiences that come to him. With him, processes of a purely spiritual nature replace the initiatory ceremonies of the Mysteries. According to Philo, sense-observation and knowledge gained through the logical intellect do not lead to the divine. They are concerned only with the transitory. But there is a way by which the soul may rise above them. It must come out of and withdraw from what it calls its ordinary "I". Then it enters a state of spiritual exaltation and illumination in which it no longer knows, thinks, or judges in the ordinary sense of the words, for it has become merged, identified, with the divine. The divine is experienced in its essence, which cannot be grasped in thoughts or imparted in concepts. It is experienced. Anyone who has had the experience knows that he can communicate it only if he is able to imbue his words with life. The world is a reflected image of this mystical reality, experienced in the innermost recesses of the soul. The world has come forth from the invisible, inconceivable God. The wisdom-filled harmony of the world, out of which material phenomena arise, is a direct spiritual image of this Godhead. It is the divine Spirit poured out into the world; cosmic reason, the Logos, the Offspring or Son of God. The Logos is the mediator between the world of the senses and the unimaginable God. When a man is penetrated through and through with higher knowledge, he is united with the Logos, which becomes embodied in him. A spiritually developed person is a bearer of the Logos. Above the Logos is God; beneath is the transitory world. It is man's vocation to form the link between the two. What he experiences in his inmost being, as spirit, is the universal Spirit. These ideas are directly reminiscent of the Pythagorean way of thinking. The kernel of existence is sought in the inner life, but this inner life is conscious of its cosmic worth. St. Augustine was thinking in virtually the same way as Philo when he said: "We see all created things because they are; but they are, because God sees them." And in describing what and how we see, he adds significantly: "Because they are, we see them outwardly; because they are perfect, we see them inwardly." Plato has the same fundamental idea. Like Plato, Philo sees in the destiny of the human soul the closing act of the great cosmic drama, the awakening of the divinity that is under a spell. He describes the inner actions of the soul by saying that the wisdom in man's inner being "follows the ways of the Father, and shapes the forms while beholding the archetypes." It is no personal matter for man to create forms in his inner being; they are the eternal wisdom, they are the cosmic life. This is in harmony with the interpretation of folk myths in the light of the Mysteries. The mystic searches for the deeper truth in the myths. And as the mystic creates the myths of paganism, so Philo handles the Mosaic story of the creation. For him, the Old Testament stories are images of inner soul-processes. The Bible relates the creation of the world. Anyone who takes it as a description of outer events knows only half of it. Certainly it is written: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." But the true inner meaning of such words must be experienced in the depths of the soul. God must be found within; then he appears as "the archetypal splendour sending forth innumerable rays; they are not visible singly, but can be apprehended as a unity by the mind". That is how Philo puts it. In Plato's Timms, the words are almost identical with those of the Bible: "Now when the Father, who had engendered the world, saw how it moved and lived, having become an image of the eternal gods, he was well pleased in it." In the Bible we read: "And God saw that it was good." For Philo, as well as for Plato and the wisdom of the Mysteries, and also in the Bible, to gain knowledge of the divine means living through the process of creation as one's own destiny. The history of creation thus flows into one with the history of the soul which is becoming divine. Philo is convinced that the account of the creation given by Moses may be used for telling the story of the soul which is seeking God. Everything in the Bible, when seen from this point of view, acquires a profoundly symbolical meaning. Philo becomes the interpreter of this symbolic meaning. He reads the Bible as the story of the soul. We may say that Philo's way of reading the Bible corresponds to a characteristic of his time which originated in the wisdom of the Mysteries. Indeed, he tells us that the Therapeutae interpreted ancient writings in the same way. "They also possess works by ancient authors who were once the leaders of their schools and left behind many explanations about the customary method used in allegorical writings .... The interpretation of such writings is directed to the deeper meaning of the allegorical narratives." Thus Philo's aim was to discover the deeper meaning of the "allegorical" narratives in the Old Testament. Let us try to bring before us where such an interpretation could lead. We read the account of the creation and find it not only a narrative of outer events, but an indication of the path the soul has to take in order to attain to the divine. Thus the soul must reproduce in itself, as a microcosm, the ways of God, and that is the only form its striving after wisdom can take. The drama of the universe must be enacted in every individual soul. The inner life of the mystical sage is the fulfilment of the prototype given in the story of creation. Moses wrote not only to relate historical facts, but to represent pictorially the paths the soul must take if it would find God. All this, in Philo's conception of the world, is enacted within the human spirit. Man experiences within himself what God has experienced in the universe. The Word of God, the Logos, becomes an event in the soul. God brought the Jews out of Egypt into Palestine; he let them undergo afflictions and privations before giving them the Promised Land. That is the outward event. Man must experience it inwardly. He goes from the land of Egypt, the perishable world, through the privations which lead to the suppression of the sense-nature, into the Promised Land of the soul; he attains to the eternal. With Philo it is all an inward process. The God who poured Himself into the world consummates His resurrection in the soul when His creative Word is understood in the soul and re-created there. Then man has given spiritual birth within himself to divinity, to the Divine Spirit that became man, to the Logos, to Christ. In this sense, for Philo and for those who thought as he did, the gaining of true knowledge was the birth of Christ within the world of spirit. The Neoplatonic philosophy, which arose contemporaneously with Christianity, was a development of Philo's thought. Let us see how Plotinus (A.D. 204.-269) describes his spiritual experiences: "Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and selfencentred; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be .... What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? "The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself; the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature." In the following words Plotinus describes the path of development that the soul should seek: "Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body's turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a louring cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality."* --------------- Notes: * From Plotinus: The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna. Published by Faber and Faber; revised edition. 1956 --------------- Clearly, this vision of the world is profoundly akin to that of Christianity. Among those who belonged as believers to the community of Jesus it was said: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life . . . declare we unto you." (I John, 1:3.). In the same way it might be said in the spirit of Neoplatonism: "That which was from the beginning, which cannot be seen or heard, must be spiritually experienced as the Word of life." And so the old conception of the world develops into a split between two leading ideas. In Neoplatonism and similar systems it leads to a purely spiritual idea of Christ; on the other side it leads to a fusion of the idea of Christ with its historical manifestation in the personality of Jesus. The writer of the Gospel of John may be said to unite these two conceptions. "In the beginning was the Word." He shares this conviction with the Neoplatonists. The Neoplatonists conclude that the Word becomes spirit within the soul. The writer of John's Gospel, and with him the whole community of Christians, conclude that the Word was made flesh in Jesus. The more intimate sense in which alone the Word could become flesh was intimated in all the ancient cosmogonies. Plato says of the macrocosm: "God has stretched the body of the world on the soul of the world in the form of a cross." This soul of the world is the Logos. If the Logos is to be made flesh, He must repeat the cosmic process in bodily existence. He must be nailed to the cross, and rise again. This most momentous Christian thought had been prefigured as a spiritual concept in the old cosmogonies long before. The mystic went through it as a personal experience during initiation. The Logos become man had to go through it in actual fact-a fact that would be valid for the whole of humanity. Something which had occurred in the old dispensation as a process in the Mysteries became, through Christianity, historical fact. Hence Christianity was the fulfilment not only of what the Jewish prophets had predicted, but also of the truth which had been prefigured in the Mysteries. The Cross of Golgotha is the Mystery cult of antiquity condensed into a fact. We find the cross first in the ancient cosmogonies. At the start of Christianity we encounter it within a unique event which is to be valid for the whole of mankind. It is from this point of view that the mystical element in Christianity can be comprehended. Christianity as mystical fact is a milestone in human evolution; and the events in the Mysteries, with their consequent effects, are the preparation for this mystical fact. ============================= 13 - Augustine and the Church The full force of the conflict which was enacted in the souls of Christian believers during the transition from paganism to the new religion is exhibited in the personality of St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) . When we see how this conflict was resolved in the mind of Augustine, we are accorded intimate insight into the struggles of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, and others. In Augustine's personality deep spiritual needs developed out of a passionate nature. He passed through pagan and semi-Christian ideas. He suffered deeply from the terrible doubts which can attack someone who has felt the impotence of many varieties of thought in the face of spiritual problems, and has tasted the depressing effect of the question, Can man know anything whatever? At the beginning of his struggles, Augustine's thoughts clung to the perishable things of the material world. He could conceive of the spiritual only in material images. It is a deliverance for him when he rises above this stage. He thus describes it in his Confessions: "When I wished to think of God, I could imagine only a mass of bodies, and believed it was the only kind of thing that could exist. This was the chief and almost the only cause of the error I could not avoid." He thus indicates the point which must be re-acted by anyone who is seeking the true life of the spirit. There are thinkers, not a few, who maintain that it is impossible to arrive at pure thought, free from any sensory content. These thinkers confuse what they feel bound to say about their own inner life with what is humanly possible. The truth rather is that it is possible to arrive at higher knowledge only when thought has been liberated from all sensory content, when an inner life has been developed in which images of reality do not cease when their demonstration in sense-impressions comes to an end. Augustine relates how he attained to spiritual vision. Everywhere he asked where the divine was to be found. "I asked the earth and she said `I am not it', and all that was upon the earth said the same. I asked the ocean and the abysses and all that lives in them, and they said, `We are not thy God, seek beyond us'. I asked the winds and the whole atmosphere, and those who dwell there said, `The philosophers who sought for the essence of things in us were under an illusion, we are not God'. I asked the sun, moon and stars, and they said, `We are not God whom thou seekest'." And it came home to St. Augustine that there was only one source which could give an answer to the question about the divine-his own soul. The soul said "No eyes or ears can impart to you what is in me. For I alone can tell you and I tell you in such a way that you cannot doubt it. Men may doubt whether vital force resides in air or in fire, but who can doubt that he himself lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? If he doubts, it is a proof that he is alive; he remembers why he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he assures himself of something, he is thinking; if he knows that he knows nothing, he is judging that he must not accept anything hastily." External things do not defend themselves when their essence and existence are denied, but the soul does defend itself. It could not be doubtful of itself unless it existed. By its doubts it confirms its own existence. "We exist and we recognize our existence, and we love our own existence and our faculty of knowing. On these three points no error in the garb of truth can trouble us, for we do not apprehend them with our bodily senses, as we do external things." Man learns about the divine by bringing his soul to know itself as spiritual, so that it may find its way, as spirit, into the spiritual world. Augustine had battled his way through to this knowledge. It was out of such an attitude of mind that in pagan countries persons in search of knowledge had been impelled to knock at the door of the Mysteries. In the age of Augustine, such convictions might lead a person to become a Christian. Jesus, the Logos become man, had shown the path which must be followed by the soul if it would attain the goal of which it must speak when in communion with itself. In A.D. 385, at Milan, Augustine was instructed by St. Ambrose. All his doubts about the Old and New Testaments vanished when the most important passages were not interpreted by his teacher in a merely literal sense, but were "spiritually laid open and expounded, the mystical veil having been lifted from them." What had been guarded in the Mysteries was embodied for Augustine in the historical tradition of the Gospels and in the community where that tradition was preserved. By degrees he comes to the conviction that Church doctrine, in "ordaining belief in things that were not proved was moderate and honest". He arrives at the idea: "Who could be so blind as to say that the Church of the Apostles deserves to have no faith placed in it, when it is so loyal and is supported by the conformity of so many brethren; when these have handed down their writings to posterity so conscientiously, and when the Church has so strictly maintained the succession of teachers, down to our present bishops?" Augustine's way of thinking told him that with the coming of Christ the conditions for souls seeking the spirit had changed. For him it was firmly established that in Christ Jesus had been revealed in the outer historical world that which the mystic. had sought through preparation in the Mysteries. One of his most significant utterances is the following: "What is now called the Christian religion already existed amongst the ancients and was not lacking at the very beginnings of the human race. When Christ appeared in the flesh, the true religion already in existence received the name of Christian." For such a mode of thinking two paths were open. One way is that if the human soul develops within it the forces which lead it to the knowledge of its true self, it will, if only it goes far enough, come also to the knowledge of the Christ and of everything connected with him. This would have been a Mystery knowledge enriched through the Christ event. The other way, taken by Augustine, became the great model for his successors. It consists in cutting off the development of the forces of the soul at a certain point, and in taking the ideas connected with the coming of Christ from written accounts and oral traditions. Augustine rejected the first way as springing from pride of soul; he thought the second was the way of true humility. Thus he says to those who wished to follow the first way "You may find peace in the truth, but for that humility is needed, which does not suit your proud neck." On the other hand, he was filled with boundless inward happiness by the fact that since the appearance of Christ in the flesh it was possible to say that spiritual experience can be attained by every soul which goes as far as it can in seeking within itself, and then, in order to reach the highest, has faith in what the written and oral traditions of the Christian community tell us about the Christ and his revelation. On this point he says: "What bliss, what abiding enjoyment of supreme and true good is offered us, what serenity, what a breath of eternity! How shall I describe it? It has been expressed, as far as it could be, by those great incomparable souls who, we admit, have beheld and still behold .... We reach a point at which we acknowledge how true is what we have been commanded to believe and how well and beneficently we have been brought up by our mother, the Church, and of what benefit was the milk given by the Apostle Paul to the little ones . . . ." (It is beyond the scope of this book to give an account of the alternative mode of thinking which is evolved from Mystery knowledge enriched through the Christ event. A description of this method will be found in my Occult Science: an Outline.) Whereas in pre-Christian times anyone who wished to seek for the spiritual foundation of existence was necessarily directed to the way of the Mysteries, Augustine was able to say, even to those souls who could find no such path within themselves, "Go as far as you can on the path of knowledge with your human powers; from there, faith (belief) will carry you up into the higher spiritual regions." It was only going one step further to say: It belongs to the nature of the human soul to be able to arrive only at a certain stage of knowledge through its own powers; from there it can advance further only through faith, through belief in the written and oral tradition. This step was taken by the spiritual movement which assigned to natural knowledge a certain sphere above which the soul could not rise by its own efforts, while everything beyond this domain was made an object of belief which has to be supported by written and oral tradition and by faith in its representatives. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest teacher within the Church (r2241274), set forth this doctrine in his writings in the most varied ways. His main point is that human cognition can attain only to that which led Augustine to self-knowledge, to the certainty of the divine. The nature of the divine and its relation to the world are given by revealed theology, which is not accessible to man's own powers of knowing and, as the substance of faith, is superior to all knowledge. The origin of this point of view may be studied in the world-conception of John Scotus Erigena, who lived in the ninth century at the court of Charles the Bald; he represents a natural transition from early Christianity to the ideas of Thomas Aquinas. His conception of the world is in the vein of Neo-Platonism. In his treatise, De Divisione Naturae, he elaborated the teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite. This teaching started with a God far above all transitory things, and derived the world from Him. Man is involved in the transfiguration of all beings into this God, Who finally attains to what He was from the beginning. Everything falls back again into the Godhead which has passed through the universal process and has become perfected. But in order to reach this goal, man must find the way to the Logos who was made flesh. In Erigena this thought leads to another: that faith in the content of the writings which give an account of the Logos leads to salvation. Reason and the authority of the Scriptures, belief and the faculty of knowing, stand on the same level. One does not contradict the other; but faith must bring that to which knowledge alone can never raise itself. The knowledge of the eternal which the ancient Mysteries withheld from the multitude became, when presented in this way by Christian thought and feeling, the content of faith, which by its very nature was related to something unattainable by mere knowledge. The conviction of the preChristian mystic was that to him was given knowledge of the divine, while the people were expected to have faith in its expression in images. Christianity came to the conviction that God has given his wisdom to mankind through revelation, and that an image of this divine revelation can be known by man. The wisdom of the Mysteries is a hothouse plant, revealed to a few individuals who are ripe for it. Christian wisdom is a mystery revealed as knowledge to none, but as a content of faith to all. The viewpoint of the Mysteries lived on in Christianity, but in an altered form. All people, not only particular individuals, were to share in the truth, but it was intended that at a certain point man should admit his inability to penetrate farther by means of knowledge, and should then rise further by faith. Christianity brought the content of the Mysteries out of the obscurity of the temple into the clear light of day. The one spiritual stream within Christianity that has been characterized here led to the idea that this content must necessarily be retained in the form of faith. ============================= Notes by the Author Page 13- Ingersoll's statements are quoted here not only with reference to people who would say that they agree with every word of them. Many people would not say that, and yet their ideas about natural phenomena and about man are such that if they were logical they would arrive at these same statements. What anyone may declare to be his theoretical conviction is not the point; what matters is whether these convictions really follow from his whole way of thinking. Someone may regard Ingersoll's words as abhorrent or laughable, but if he himself explains things in terms merely of external facts, without taking account of the spiritual background which lies behind natural phenomena, he will come by logical necessity to a materialistic philosophy. Page 13. From the facts indicated by the current cliches, "struggle for existence", "omnipotence of natural selection" and so on, the "Spirit of Nature" speaks powerfully to a discerning observer. But it is not so with the opinions which modern science builds on these facts. The facts are the reason why modern science will be listened to in ever-wider circles. But the opinions of science should not be accepted as though they followed unavoidably from knowledge of the facts. The possibility of being misled by such knowledge, however, is immeasurably great to-day. Page 15. From remarks such as those on the sources of the Gospel of Luke it should not be concluded that purely historical research is undervalued by the author of this book. That is not so. Historical research is thoroughly justified, but it should not be intolerant towards the way of thinking which proceeds from spiritual points of view. In this book no value is placed on bringing in quotations at all possible points, but anyone of good will can see clearly that an all-round, truly unprejudiced judgment will find no contradiction anywhere between what is said here and what has been truly established historically. Admittedly, anyone who does not want to be impartial, but regards this or that theory as a proven certainty, may find that the assertions in this book are untenable from the "scientific" standpoint, and "without any objective foundation". Page 20. It is said here that those whose spiritual eyes are open can see into the spiritual world. But it should not be inferred that only those with "spiritual sight" can form a rational judgment of the initiate's findings. "Spiritual eyes" are necessary only for research. When the results of research are communicated, they can be understood by anyone who allows his intelligence and unprejudiced sense of truth to speak. He can also apply these results to life and gain satisfaction from them without as yet possessing "spiritual eyes" himself. Page 22. The "sinking into the mire" of which Plato speaks must be interpreted in the sense of the preceding note. Page 23. What is said about the impossibility of communicating the teachings of the Mysteries refers to the fact that to anyone who is unprepared they cannot be communicated in the form in which they are experienced by the initiate. But they always have been communicated in a form such that the non-initiate could understand them. For example, the myths provided the ancient form for communicating the content of the Mysteries in a generally comprehensible manner. Page 60. In ancient mysticism, "mantic" signifies everything relevant to knowledge gained through "spiritual eyes". On the other hand, "telestic" indicates the paths that lead to initiation. Page 108. "Kabiri", in the sense of ancient mysticism, are beings whose consciousness is far above that of modern man. Schelling means to say that through initiation man himself rises above his present consciousness and comes to a higher one. Page 114. On the significance of the number seven, an explanation can be found in my Occult Science (Leipzig, r g r o ; revised English translation, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1963). Page 116. The meaning of the apocalyptic symbols can be indicated only very briefly here. Of course one could enter much more deeply into all these things; but that would be outside the scope of this book. =============================