The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

carried it into the field of correspondences in time. Smaller historical periods he considered as ‘reflections’ of larger epochs (for instance the Hellenic age of the time of Atlantis), while in the life of the child the three seven year periods which childhood comprises are reflected in smaller divisions in each single period, and even the three miraculous achievements of the child’s earliest years, walking, speaking and thinking, may be considered as a microcosm of the powers of willing, feeling and thinking which he develops in succession as he grows to manhood.

It is in the achievement of this union of the self with the great world, the ability to say ‘I am that’, as it is expressed in Eastern wisdom, that there arises the experience known in Mystery Wisdom as secing the sun at midnight. ‘I saw the sun’—writes Apuleius—‘gleaming with bright splendour at dead of night.’

The sun in the ancient world was not considered, as it is today, purely as the physical giver of physical light (if even this light may be called physical). Julian the Apostate, who was initiated into the Mysteries both of Eleusis and of Mithras, wrote his famous hymn to the Threefold Sun. The Greeks long before had distinguished between the physically visible sun (helios) and the sun’s spiritual potency (Apollo). At Delphi there were no oracles in the winter, for while Helios travelled southward Apollo took his departure to the north. Homer speaks of Apollo descending to earth ‘like the night’. The experience of light attained in the Mysteries was undoubtedly that of spiritual light. There is no doubt a great difference both in the experience itself and in its attainment as between ancient and modern initiation. For the modern experience, as Steiner tells us in the same lecture course, is bound up with the human ego which had not yet come to full expression in the ancient world. It is that of the ego becoming one with the spiritual sun, and from that exalted region looking down upon the body as the sun itself looks down on the plants which it vivifies and nurtures.

In saying this we are already passing the bounds of aporreton (the forbidden) and reaching the arreton (the ineffable). But to give some kind of completion, however crude, to Steiner’s account of the Mysteries one other figure must be added which constantly appears in ancient Mystery cults, and not least at Eleusis, the mourning woman: Demeter mourning for Persephone, Isis for Osiris, Astarte for Thammuz, culminating in the mater

10