The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

dolorosa of Christian tradition. In all these Mystery figures of the dying God Steiner saw a prophetic imagination of what has once to take place on the plane of history and physical reality. “Christianity as Mystical Fact’ is the title of one of his earlier books. The Divine Sun-Being, the Cosmic Christ, entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth and suffered the death and resurrection foreshadowed in the religion of the Mysteries. That is why so many elements of the Mysteries enter into the life of Christ. And Steiner called attention to the fact that the last word of Christ on the Cross need not necessarily be rendered: ‘It is finished’. For the original Greek word tetelestai is a word taken from the heart of the Mysteries. At Eleusis the Hall of Initiation was called the telesterion and the initiate himself was a teletes. It would therefore be equally possible, and probably more true, to render Christ’s last words as: “The Mystery is accomplished.”

It cannot be too much emphasised that Steiner did not think that Mystery wisdom was unchanging. It was already a far cry from the Egyptian preoccupation with the mystery of the body to the Eleusinian cry of ‘Iacchos’. At one time Steiner demonstrated this development in an outstanding way. As already described, he conceived biography as spiritual form, and showed that this conception leads naturally to the idea of re-incarnation. But such a form no more exists in isolation than do organic forms. It depends on its interaction with many other ‘spiritual form’. As an imaginative—and yet real—picture of such an interweaving of biographies from one incarnation to another, Steiner wrote four Mystery Plays. They are not plays in the ordinary conception of drama. The action is almost entirely inward, showing how the thought and being of one character affects and is affected by that of others: and the spiritual Beings who stand invisible behind the facade of life play their full share in the action. Moreover, for the performance of these plays in especial, he built the only building of modern times which could be called a Mystery Temple, the first Goetheanum in Switzerland which was unhappily destroyed by fire within a few years of its completion. It expressed in architecture a principle which was represented in the lives of the characters in the plays, the principle of metamorphosis. Between building and play there was thus a consonance

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