The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

It was at this time also that in response to a request made to him—it was his method to meet the demands which life brought to him—Steiner created a new art of movement which he called Eurythmy. One of the great differences between the old pagan and the Christian religious ritual which supplanted it is that the latter entirely eliminated the element of the dance. But the Roman writer Lucian tells us (and there is plenty of evidence to support him) that ‘there were no Mysteries without dancing’, To create again a form of movement capable not merely of representing a religious scene but of immediately expressing religious experience was Steiner’s achievement in the domain of movement. Of course Eurythmy can—and does—cover a wider field as well. But there is always in it something of what Matthew Arnold called ‘high seriousness’. Even without doing the movements himself, the spectator follows them in imagination and experiences something of the creative power of sound in word and music which played also into the ancient Mysteries. Were not the hereditary priests of Eleusis called the Eumolpidae—the Sweet Singers?

The first Goetheanum and its activities expressed the new Mystery wisdom in the sphere of the arts, the realm of feeling. But increasingly toward the end of his life, and especially after the burning of that unparalleled building, Steiner—again in response to definite requests—brought his Mystery wisdom, the wisdom of life, into many practical activities, education, curative education, farming and horticulture, medicine and many others. For in all these spheres there were men and women who realised that human thought and endeavour has become imprisoned in the sphere of the calculable, and that the only escape was by means of a new form of consciousness, a new spiritual revelation. Nor have matters greatly improved since Steiner’s death. In a mechanical world men are still secking the element of creation, in an organised world the faculty of freedom, in a specialised world the sanity of the universal. All this was summed up by that wonderful woman Simone Weil in her conception of a new saintliness for which the age is calling, a saintliness ‘which is equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny’. This is the new Mystery Wisdom, and many who have devoted thejeeliues to the study of his work believe that Rudolf Steine