The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

interpret the myth as corn process at all—as difficult as it is to feel how the sight of a blade of corn in the Mystery Sanctuary could have produced the ecstatic experience described by the participants as an assurance of immortality.

The difficulty partly arises from the endeavour to tie down a myth to physical objects. The experience of man—even as late as the Greeks—was an experience of processes rather than objects. In connection with nature it could be called an experience of the etheric rather than of the physical. Demeter is the fruitfulness of the earth experienced as living process: Persephone the fruitfulness in realisation. In their abstract but acute terms, the schoolmen might have said the one exists in posse the other in esse. At all levels the two are not easily to be distinguished, so it need not surprise us that in some variants of the myth Demeter plays many of Persephone’s parts. But we shall not understand the meaning of the myth unless we take into account its microcosmic as well as its macrocosmic significance. This Rudolf Steiner explains as follows. When we take food and digest it, all unperceived by our consciousness a work of immense wisdom is taking place (Steiner said that teachers ought always to remember how much greater was the wisdom with which the children were digesting their breakfast than in anything they would learn in their lessons), This wisdom was not always as unconscious as it is today. By a kind of instinctive clairvoyance it would light up in pictures in the still half-dreaming mind of man. In the microcosm the fruitful power of the earth (Demeter) gave birth to a dream picture of the world (Persephone). It is interesting to notice that in one version of her myth Persephone is described as sitting in front of her cave and weaving a picture of the world.

This early picture consciousness united man with man, and man with the world. In the history of Greece it was gradually giving birth to the individualised intellectual consciousness. But it could still be evoked under special circumstances and pressure. It was the entering of the light of this consciousness, the experience of Persephone in the human soul, which was the great event of the Eleusinian Mystery. It brought—as all Mysteries bring—an experience which cannot properly be described in words—arreton, ineffable.

It was said above that in the history of Greece clairvoyant Picture consciousness was giving birth to the individualised

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