The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture Eight

[ 1 ] Christian initiation has existed since the origins of Christianity and the time of the Apostles, and it has remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages and up to the present day, both among the numerous religious orders and among the Rosicrucians. This initiation consists of spiritual exercises that produce the same, unchanging effects. The societies that carry it out in the deepest secrecy are the true cradle of all spiritual life as well as of all religious progress of humanity.

[ 2 ] Christian initiation is, in a certain sense, more difficult than the initiation of antiquity. This is connected with the nature and mission of Christianity, which came into the world at a time when humankind was undergoing its deepest descent into matter. This descent must bestow upon him a new consciousness, but rising from this depth, from this material density, demands a greater effort on his part and makes initiation more difficult. For this reason, the Christian master demands a higher degree of humility and devotion from his disciple.

[ 3 ] Christian initiation has always consisted of seven stages. Four of these correspond to the four stations of Calvary. They are as follows:

First: The Washing of the Feet
Second: The Scourging
Third: The Crowning with Thorns
Fourth: The Carrying of the Cross
Fifth: The Mystical Death
Sixth: The Burial
Seventh: The Resurrection

[ 4 ] The washing of feet is a preparatory exercise of a purely moral nature. It refers to the scene in which Christ washes the disciples’ feet before the Passover (Gospel of John 13). “Truly, truly, I say to you: A servant is not greater than his master, nor is an apostle greater than the one who sent him.” Theology gives this act a purely moral interpretation and sees in it merely an example of profound humility and the Master’s absolute submission to his disciples and to his mission. The Rosicrucians also see this in it, but in a much deeper sense that encompasses the evolution of all beings in nature. It is an allusion to the law that the higher is the product of the lower. The plant might say to the stone: “I am above you, for I have life, which you do not have; but without you I could not exist, for from you I draw the sap that nourishes me.” —- And the animal might say to the plant: “I am above you, for I have sensations, passions, and impulses of will that you do not have, but without the food you give me—without your leaves, grasses, and fruits—I could not live.” And man would have to say to the plants: “I am above you, but I owe you the oxygen I breathe.” He would have to say to the animals: “I have a soul that you do not have, but we are brothers and companions, and we are advancing together in the general course of evolution.” — The esoteric meaning of the washing of the feet is therefore that Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, could not exist without the Apostles.

[ 5 ] The student who has meditated on this subject for months, and sometimes for years, experiences the vision of the washing of the feet on the astral plane while asleep. He can then ascend to the second degree of Christian initiation:

[ 6 ] The Scourging: At this stage, the individual learns to withstand the scourge of life. Life brings us suffering of every kind: physical and moral, intellectual and spiritual. In this phase, the student experiences life as a terrible and unceasing ordeal. He must endure it with complete equanimity of soul and stoic courage. He must no longer know fear, whether physical or moral. Once he has become fearless, he sees the scene of the scourging in a dream. In the course of another vision, he sees himself being scourged in place of Christ. This event is accompanied by certain physical symptoms and, through an intensification of the entire sensory faculty, extends to the whole sense of life and love.

[ 7 ] An example of this hyper-acute sensibility, transferred into intellectual life, can be found in Goethe’s life. After extensive osteological studies of the human skeleton and the skeletons of animals, as well as comparative observations, Goethe concluded that the intermaxillary bone must exist in humans. Before him, it had been denied that the intermaxillary bone could be found in the human upper jaw. He himself recounts that he leaped for joy and fell into a kind of ecstasy when he discovered that this bone does indeed exist in the human jaw, still visible through a suture. He himself calls it one of the most wondrous events of his life. Goethe experienced the same feeling during his trip to Italy, when, upon seeing the remains of a sheep’s skull, that other idea came to him—one that was even more wondrous for human evolution—an idea that could be called both esoteric and Darwinian: namely, that the human brain, the center of reason—with the cerebellum situated before it, the center of volitional movements—is a blossom and an unfolding of the spinal cord, just as the blossom is an unfolding and synthesis of the root and the stem. How did Goethe make these wondrous discoveries, which alone would secure his immortality? Certainly through his superior intellect, but also through his lively and profound sympathy with all beings and with all of nature. This sensitivity is a refinement and expansion of the forces of life and love. It corresponds to the second degree of Christian initiation and is the result of the trial of scourging. Human beings acquire a feeling of love for all beings that allows them to live within nature.

[ 8 ] The Crowning with Thorns: Here, a person must learn to defy the world—morally and intellectually—and to endure contempt when what is most precious to him is attacked. He must be able to remain upright when everything is pressing him down; to say “yes” when the whole world says “no.” This is what must be learned before moving on. A new aspect now presents itself: the power of discernment—or rather, the ability to instantly distinguish between three forces that are always intertwined in human beings: will, feeling, and thought. One must learn to separate or unite them at will. As long as, for example, an external event fills us with such enthusiasm that it sweeps us off our feet, we are not mature, for this enthusiasm, triggered by the event, does not come from within us and can even exert a shattering influence over us that we cannot control. The student’s enthusiasm should find its origin solely in the depths of the mystical life. One must therefore remain dispassionate toward every event, whatever its nature. Only in this way does one attain freedom. This separation between feeling, intellect, and will brings about a transformation in the brain characterized by the crowning with thorns. For this transformation to take place safely, it is necessary that the powers of the personality be sufficiently trained and perfectly balanced. If this is not the case, or if the student has a poor guide, this change can trigger madness. Madness, in fact, is based on nothing other than this split, which takes place outside the will, without the unity being able to be restored through inner willpower. In contrast, the student practices making this split disappear whenever he wishes. A flash of his will restores the bond between the organs and functions of his soul, whereas in the case of the insane person, the rift may become irreparable and cause damage to the central nervous system.

[ 9 ] During the stage known in Christian initiation as the Crowning with Thorns, a terrifying phenomenon occurs, known as the “Keeper of the Threshold,” which could also be called the appearance of the doppelganger. The human spirit, formed from one’s currents of will, desires, and intellectual faculties, then appears to the initiate as an image in the dream state. And this image is sometimes repulsive and terrifying, for it is the result of the person’s good and bad qualities and their karma; it is the pictorial personification of all this on the astral plane. This is the evil ferryman in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The person must defeat him in order to find their higher self. The Keeper of the Threshold, a phenomenon of clairvoyant vision dating back to the earliest times, is the true origin of all the myths about the hero’s struggle with the monster—Perseus and Heracles with the Hydra, Saint George and Siegfried with the dragon.

[ 10 ] The premature onset of clairvoyance and the sudden appearance of the doppelganger or the Keeper of the Threshold can drive to madness those who have not followed all the preparations and taken all the precautions required of the student.

[ 11 ] The bearing of the cross, in turn, symbolically refers to a spiritual virtue. This virtue, which consists in carrying the world, as it were, within one’s consciousness—just as Atlas carried the world on his shoulders—could be called: the feeling of becoming one with the earth and with all that it holds within itself. In Eastern initiation, this is called: the end of the sense of separation.

[ 12 ] People, especially modern people, generally identify with their bodies. In his Ethics, Spinoza identifies the first fundamental idea of a human being: the idea of the body in action. The student must cultivate within himself the idea that, in the totality of things, his body is no more important than any other body—be it that of an animal, a table, or a piece of marble. The self does not end at the skin: it is one with the whole of life in the world, just as our hand is one with the entirety of our physicality. What would the hand be on its own? A scrap! What would the human body be without the earth on which it stands, without the air it breathes? It would die, for it is only a tiny particle of this earth and its atmosphere. For this reason, the student must immerse himself in every being and become one with the spirit of the earth.

[ 13 ] Once again, it is Goethe who has provided a magnificent description of this stage in the first part of his Faust, where the Earth Spirit, whom Faust summons, appears to him and says:

In the torrents of life, in the storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
Weaving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A shifting weave,
A blazing life;
Thus I work at the whirring loom of time
And weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 14 ] Feeling at one with all beings does not mean despising one’s body, but rather carrying it as an external object, just as Christ carried his cross. The spirit should carry the body just as the hand holds the hammer. Then the disciple becomes aware of the occult powers that lie dormant within his body. In this way, during the course of his meditation, he can bring about the stigmata on his skin. This is the sign that he is ready for the fifth stage, where the following is revealed to him in a sudden flash of enlightenment:

[ 15 ] Mystical death: While subjected to the greatest suffering, the disciple says to himself: “I realize that the entire sensory world is merely an illusion.” He truly feels as if he is dying and sinking into darkness. But then he sees the darkness tear apart and a new light appear: the astral light shines forth. This is the tearing of the veil in the temple. This light has nothing in common with the light of the sun. It bursts forth from beyond things and beyond humanity. The sensation it causes bears no resemblance to that of external light. To get an idea of this, let us use the following comparison: Imagine moving away from a noisy city and entering a dense forest. Gradually, the sounds fade away, and the silence becomes complete. Finally, one begins to perceive what lies beyond the silence—to cross the zero point where every external sound has died away. Sound returns to the inner ear from the other side of life. This is what the experience feels like for the soul as it enters the astral world. It comes into contact with the inner nature of the things it knows—just as one enters a growing sequence of negative numbers beyond zero.

[ 16 ] One must have lost everything in order to regain everything, even one’s own existence. But at the moment when one loses everything, it seems as though one dies to oneself and begins to live outside of oneself. This is the mystical death. Once one has gone through it, the time has come for:

[ 17 ] Burial: At that moment, a person is overcome by the feeling that their own body has become foreign to them and that they are completely one with the planet. They have merged with the Earth and find themselves once again part of the planet’s life.

[ 18 ] The Resurrection: It is an indescribable feeling that cannot possibly be described except as “in the innermost part of the sanctuary.” For at this final stage, all words fail, and every comparison falls short. Having reached this stage, one receives the gift of healing. However, it must be added that the one who receives it also simultaneously receives the opposite ability: to cause illness, for the negative always accompanies the positive. Hence the great responsibility associated with this ability, which can be characterized as follows: the creative word flows from the soul in fire.