LECTURE
XII.
THE
MYSTERIES OF THE SAMOTHRACIAN KABIRI
Dornach,
21st December, 1923.
IN
the course of the last few weeks I have drawn your attention to many
different kinds of Mysteries, and we have especially attempted to
obtain an insight into those Mysteries which were, so to say, the
last of the great Mysteries which connected man s inner being
directly with the life of nature, with the spirit of nature. These
were the Mysteries of Hibernia; and we have seen how, through insight
into man himself, an insight which was, however, of an intimate
spiritual as well as an individual personal nature, the Mysteries of
Greece also penetrated into the inner being of man. One can indeed
say that as in the world of external nature the different regions of
the earth bring forth this or that kind of vegetation, so in the
course of human evolution there streamed down into the different
regions of the earth the most manifold influences from the spiritual
world, and these worked upon mankind.
If we were to pass over to the East, the Orient —
as we are to do shortly in a historical connection — we should
find there many other kinds of Mysteries; but today, as all our
visitors are not yet present with us, I will link on rather to what
we have already studied in preference to beginning something new.
If we look back at the course of human evolution, we may
say that there appears before our Imaginative consciousness, with all
possible clearness, a threefold evolution. I say “before our
Imaginative consciousness,” because of course if we extend
those epochs of which I am now speaking further back still, towards
still earlier times, we naturally get a greater number than three,
and this is also the case if we go further on into the future; but we
will today take these middle stages of human evolution, which appear
not through Inspiration but already in all clearness before our
Imagination; these we will place before our souls today and study
them from one particular point of view.
Now, even down to the Egyptian time it was still the
case for humanity that, as regards the consciousness of that time —
and this applies to the African and European races as well as to the
Asiatic races — what we today call matter simply did not exist.
Human consciousness did not even grasp the external coarse
substances, let alone those abstractions which we today describe as
carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, and so on. These things simply did not
exist for them; but everything which was spread out externally in
nature was seen directly as the body of divine spiritual beings, who
revealed themselves in the whole of nature. Today we can go out into
the mountains, we can tread on the rocks, we can even throw stones,
and all these things we regard as indifferent neutral substances. In
our consciousness today there is nothing in any way similar to what
was in the consciousness of the ancient, Egyptian or the ancient
Oriental.
When we confront a human being today and take hold, let
us say, of his hand, that which we touch as a human hand we do not
regard as something indifferent. We regard it as something belonging
to an entire human organism, and if we observe the tip of the index
finger of a human being, we cannot do otherwise than say: this is
part of a complete organism.
This was also the case with the ancient Egyptians and
the ancient Easterns as regards their consciousness. If they trod on
a stone or picked up a stone, that was not to them an indifferent
object as it would be to us today; it was not for them just an
ordinary earthly substance, it was part of a divine body which was
what the earth appeared to them to be. These ancient peoples related
themselves consciously to the entire surface, the external surface of
the earth, just as we relate ourselves in our consciousness to our
skin. If today we approach a human being, and through something or
other which comes to our consciousness he reminds us of another human
being whom we know, but who is not there, and when it transpires that
this human being is the brother or the sister of that other, then we
realize that there exists between these two human beings a common
flesh and blood, they belong together in a certain bodily way. And
when an ancient Greek or an ancient Oriental directed his gaze to
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and then looked down to the earth, he saw in
this earth the divine body of the earthly God; but he saw at the same
time in this earth the sister or perhaps the brother, in short, a
relation of those planets, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, which travel in
their orbits round the earth.
Thus there was amongst the ancients something completely
of a soul-spiritual nature in their perception of the whole cosmos
and of the earth as part of this cosmos.
You must realize clearly and deeply what an utterly
different significance this had for those souls as compared with the
man of today. It meant a great deal to look at the earth as a divine
body and to see in it a relative, a sisterly relation, as it were, to
all the other planets of the cosmic system; for the ancients
conceived the entire cosmos as filled by the gods. They conceived not
only the whole earth as being filled with gods, but beyond the
planetary bodies they saw each single member of the planetary beings
filled with gods. In stones, in trees, in the rivers, springs,
clouds, in lightning, in all these things some sort of spiritual
beings revealed themselves to them. This consciousness was awakened
far and wide among the races over the earth, and was specially
deepened in the various Mystery-Centres which were to be found here
and there upon the earth.
If we trace the development of Greek life to that time
when the external greatness of Greece gradually diminished into
simply a kind of chaos of its various peoples, at the time when the
Macedonian nation arose, we find how at that time there flowed over
into human knowledge what we learned to know in the last lecture here
in the form of Aristotelianism, that which Alexander the Great, in a
spiritual sense, regarded as his racial task. But when we come on the
one hand to this culminating point in the history of Greece, and on
the other to the downfall of Greece and the rise of the Macedonian
nation, we see how, besides what outer history relates, which is
legendary compared with the reality, out of the depths of the
consciousness of the deeper spirits there came an impulse received
from those Mysteries of which Aristotle does not speak, but to which
he was closely related. These were the Mysteries which in the deepest
sense aroused into the full life of consciousness in the pupils the
fact that the whole cosmos is a Theogony, an evolution of the Gods,
and that one only regards the cosmos in an illusory way if one
believes that anything else exists in the cosmos but the Gods, the
divine beings, those Gods who stand there as the Essences, the life
and essence of the cosmos. It is the Gods, the Divine Beings, who
have experiences in this cosmos, they it is who bring about the
deeds. What man sees as cloud formations, what he hears as thunder,
what he perceives as lightning, what he perceives on earth as rivers,
and as mountains, and the mineral kingdom, All these are simply
manifestations, expressions of the destiny of the Gods who conceal
themselves behind these. Even that which appears outwardly as
cloud-formations, thunder and lightning, trees, rivers and mountains
is nothing but what divine existence reveals; just as the skin of man
reveals the inner being of a soul behind the skin. If the Gods are
everywhere, then man has to distinguish — and this was taught
to the Mystery pupils in Northern Greece — between the lesser
Gods, those who revealed themselves in the different beings and
processes of nature, and the great Gods, who expressed the beings of
Sun, Mars, and Mercury, and of a fourth which cannot be made visible
through any picture or form. These were the great Gods, the great
Planetary Spirits, those great Planetary Gods who were regarded in
such a way that when man turned his gaze outwards towards the cosmic
spaces, it was not only his eye which was kindled but also his entire
heart learnt to perceive what lived in the Sun, Mars and Mercury, and
not only lived externally in this small circle of the cosmos, but
everywhere in cosmic space, and above all draws near to man.
Then after a majestic impulse was awakened in the pupils
of the Northern Greek Mysteries through his gaze having been first
directed towards the planetary orbits themselves, it was then
deepened, in a human sense, so that his vision was taken possession
of as it were by the heart; and he learnt to see psychically, with
the soul. Then the pupil understood why on the altar there were
placed before him three symbolic vessels, pitchers.
We once made use of a copy of these vessels here in an
Eurhythmy presentation of Faust, and as you saw these three vessels,
so they were seen in the Samothracian Mysteries, the Northern Greek
Mysteries; but the essential thing was that through these vessels,
these pitchers, in their whole symbolic form, a sacrificial ritual, a
ritual of consecration took place. A kind of incense was put into
these three vessels, which was then kindled, and when the smoke
poured out, three words of which we shall speak further to-morrow
were uttered with mantric power by the celebrant. These words were
uttered into the smoke which rose up above the vessels, and then
there appeared the forms of the three Kabiri. They appeared because
the human breath breathed out through the mantric words, fashioned
itself, and then imparted its form to the rising smoke, the incense
arising from the substance which was incorporated into these symbolic
vessels. While the pupil learnt to read in this way what was written
in the smoke by his, own breathing, he learnt to read, at the same
time, what the mysterious planets spoke to him from out of the great
universe. Now he knew that the form assumed by the first of the
Kabiri through the mantric word and its power represented the reality
behind Mercury; in the form assumed by the second Kabiri he learnt
the reality of Mars; and in that of the third Kabiri he learnt the
reality of Apollo, the Sun.
Now when you look at those fashion-plate figures (and
you must pardon me for using this strong expression) which are
unfortunately mostly to be seen in picture galleries of the later
Greek sculpture, and which are greatly valued because people have no
idea from what these forms have arisen — if one considers these
fashion-plate figures of Apollo, Mars and Mercury, one should look at
them with, as it were, the gaze of Goethe, that gaze which Goethe
applied during his Italian journey in order, through these
fashion-plate forms, to get some idea of what Greek art really was in
its freshness, that Greek art which was destroyed with so much else
during the first few centuries after the foundation of Christianity.
If one is able as it were to look through those later Greek plastic
forms, which in one sense are rightly valued because they are
signposts, but which being simply descendants from what lived before,
should not be considered great — if one looks back to that from
which they came, one sees that in the older Greek Art, copies were
made of sacrificial revelations, revelations which arose in a much
earlier epoch in a much more majestic and mighty way than we find
them later in Samothrace, in these Mysteries of the Kabiri. One looks
back to those times in which the mantric word was uttered into the
sacrificial smoke, and the true form of Apollo, of Mars and of
Mercury then appeared.
Those were times in which man did not say abstractly:
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a
God was the Word;” those were times when man could say
something else, when he could say: “My out-breathing fashions
itself, it takes form; and while this expiration takes form in a
regular way, it reveals itself as an image of cosmic creation,
because it creates for me from the sacrificial smoke forms which for
me are a living script, a living writing; and this writing reveals to
me what the planetary worlds desire to say to me.”
When the pupil of the Kabiri Mysteries in Samothrace
approached the portals of these temples of initiation, then, because
of the instruction he had gone through, he had this feeling: “Now
at last I am entering something which reveals to me the magical deeds
of the sacrificial Father;” for in these Mysteries the
initiating Celebrant was called “Father.” What did the
magical powers of this celebrant Father reveal to the pupil? Through
that which the Gods laid down in man (i.e. the power of speech) this
priestly magician and sage, this Hierophant, was able to write
certain signs in the sacrificial smoke) certain characteristics; and
these uttered the secrets of the universe.
Therefore the pupil, when he approached the temple of
initiation, could say in his heart: “I am now entering
something which reveals to me a mighty spirit, the great Gods, those
great Gods who through these sacrificial rites, reveal on the earth
the secrets of the cosmos.”
That was a speech which was there spoken, a writing
which was there written, which truly did not appeal to the intellect
of man, but which made a claim on the whole being of man. In the
Samothracian Mysteries there still existed something of a knowledge
which today has quite disappeared. Man is today capable of saying,
with truth, what a quartz crystal feels like, what a hair feels like,
what the human skin feels like, what the skin of an animal feels
like, what silk or velvet feel like. Man is today capable of that. He
can realize all these things vividly in his feeling. In the
Samothracian Mysteries something else existed by means of which man
could realize with truth how the Gods could be felt. For the sense of
touch in these ancient times was still such that man was capable of
feeling, of contacting the Gods. The most marvelous thing is really
the following, and one has to go back to these ancient times if one
ventures to say that man could assert with truth: “I know
through my finger tips how the Gods contact one another.” In
these Samothracian Mysteries there existed another method by which
one could touch, contact the Gods, and this consisted in the
following.
While the priestly magician spoke into this sacrificial
smoke the mantric words, while he caused these words to resound forth
in his expiration, he felt in his outgoing breath just as man usually
feels when he stretches out a hand to touch something; and just as we
know the different feeling in our finger-tips when they are
contacting say silk, to what they feel when they contact velvet or
touch the fur of a cat or the skin of a human being, in the same way
the Samothracian priestly magician felt with the air he breathed out,
which went forth into the sacrificial smoke, an utterance of
something which came from himself. He felt his expiration as an organ
of touch, which went into the smoke. He felt the smoke; and in the
smoke he felt these great Gods, the Kabiri, streaming towards him. He
felt how the smoke took form and that those forms which developed in
the smoke came from outside to the expiration of breath. These
out-breathings formed here into curves, there into angles, while at
times something as it were grasped him; thus the whole divine form of
the Kabiri was experienced by means of the mantric words in which the
breath was clothed. Through the words which came out of the heart the
sacrificing Hierophant contacted these great Gods, the descending
Kabiri, who came to him in the sacrificial smoke. There was a living
interchange between the Logos in man and the Logos outside in the
cosmic spaces.
Thus while the initiating Father led the pupil before
the sacrificial altar and gradually instructed him in the way in
which he learnt to feel while speaking, and while the pupil
progressed more and more and learnt to feel himself in this element
of speech, he finally came to that stage of inner experience in which
he had a clear consciousness of how Hermes, or Mercury was fashioned,
of how Apollo was fashioned, and of how Aries or Mars was fashioned.
It was as though the entire consciousness of man was lifted out of
his body and what the pupil formerly knew as the content of his head
was lifted out and remained above it. It was as though the forces of
his heart were pressed into a different place, as though the forces
of the heart were driven into the head. And in this human being
really transcending, going out of himself, there arose something
which formed these words: “It is thus that the Kabiri, the
great Gods desire you to be.” From that moment the pupil knew
that Mercury lived in his limbs, the Sun in his heart, and Mars in
his speech.
You see it is not only the processes and being of nature
in the external world that were brought before the pupil in these
ancient times; what was brought before him was neither one-sided
naturalistically nor in a moral way. It was something in which
morality and nature flowed together in unity; and that was just the
secret of these Samothracian Mysteries, that the pupil received this
consciousness directly: “Nature is spirit; spirit is nature.”
In the times which found their last echo in the
Samothracian Kabiri service, arose the insight which can bring
earthly substances into harmony with the entire heavens. In these
ancient times a man could not say, when he looked at that
reddish-brown material which has the shining appearance of copper, at
that substance which we today call copper, he could not say as one
does today: “That is copper; that is a constituent of the
earth.” At that time such a thing would have been
inconceivable. Copper was no constituent of the earth for these
ancient peoples, but the deed of Venus in the earth which revealed
itself as copper. The earth only allows stones such as sandstone,
chalk, to arise, in order to receive into her bosom what the heavens
imprinted into the earth. Just as little as we today are able to say
that the seed simply grows out of the earth, so little at that time
could one say, in regard to the surface of the earth, and copper ore
in the earth, “This copper ore is a constituent of the earth.”
What one had to say then was: “The earth here with its
sandstone or other soil is simply the basis, the soil; and what
exists by way of metal inside it has been placed in the earth by the
planets.” This is a seed implanted in the earth by a planet,
and everything which exists in this way on the earth was then seen as
something impelled into the earth from the heavens.
We today describe the earth with the substances in it,
as we may see in any book on mineralogy or geology; but the ancient
science would not have described things in the same way. At that time
a man could let his gaze roam over the earth, but when he saw the
substances with it he had to take the heavens into consideration; and
it was in the heavens that he saw the real beings of substances. It
is only apparently that copper, tin, lead, etc., lie in the earth. In
reality they are simply the seeds which have been implanted into the
earth during the ancient Sun and Moon existence, implanted from the
heavens into earthly existence.
Now this was still the teaching of the Kabiri in the
Samothracian Mysteries, and that finally was something which gave at
any rate the atmosphere of the knowledge in which Aristotle and
Alexander the Great worked. And then the beginning was created for
something quite different.
Humanity did not descend at once with this insight on to
the earth: humanity had first to pass through a transitional period
in these ancient times. Now even in these echoes of the ancient times
which we find in the Samothracian Mysteries, when the metals of the
earth or even other substances of the earth such as sulphur or
phosphorus were to be described, then the heavens were described as
we describe the plant when we seek to know the nature of the seed. We
cannot recognise a seed, we cannot get to know the nature of a seed,
unless we know the plant. What should we do, for instance, with a
seed which appears like this _ unless we knew, at the same time, what
the aniseed plant looks like? The ancients would have said: “What
can you make of the copper which is found in the earth unless you
know how Venus appears spiritually, psychically, and bodily, up above
in the heavens?”
Out
of this knowledge of the heavens there gradually arose what I must
call a knowledge of the atmosphere, wherein men in studying the earth
no longer described the stars in their living essence, but when they
saw an earthly being, they said: In this there lives first of all
that which we see in solid earth, then also there is that which we
see tending towards the drop-form of the liquids. Then there lives
that which seeks to expand itself on all sides, that which is airy,
that which lives, for instance, in the human organism in breath and
in speech. Finally there lives the fiery element, which dissolves
each individual being, so that out of the dissolved constituents new
beings can arise. These elements live in every earthly formation.
Now, as formerly in the ancient Mysteries man could look
to the salt element which is of course fashioned cosmically, but into
the fashioning of which the earth intervenes, they saw in that salt
element that which Mother earth brought to the metals and in the
mercurial element, everything which streamed out of the cosmos in
order to become metal.
Indeed it is infinitely childish when people begin today
to give descriptions of what Mercury was still supposed to be in the
Middle Ages. Behind all those descriptions there stands in the
background the idea that Mercury in the Middle Ages was something
similar to quicksilver, or at any rate that some particular metal was
understood by that; but that is absolutely not the case. Mercury is
every metal in so far as it stands under the influence of the entire
cosmos; for how would copper come into being if the cosmos from its
periphery alone worked on this metal? In that case copper would be of
a drop-form quicksilver. How would lead appear if the cosmos alone
worked? Lead would also appear in drop-formation, as quicksilver
also. How would tin appear if the cosmos alone worked? Tin also would
be in drop-form. Each metal, if only the cosmos worked, would be
quicksilver; for all metals are mercury in so far as the cosmos works
on them; only the actual present day quicksilver still takes the
drop-form on earth. What then is quicksilver really? The fact is, the
other metals — lead, copper, tin, iron — have transcended
the drop-form. When the whole earth still stood under the influence
of the spherical cosmos, all metals were mercury, but they have
transcended the mercurial form and so today they are crystallized in
other shapes. Only the actual quicksilver, what we today know as
such, has remained stationary at that early stage.
What then would the ancients and even the medieval
alchemists have said of quicksilver? They would have said: “Copper,
tin, lead are the good metals, because they have progressed with
evolution. Quicksilver is the Lucifer among the metals, because it
has remained stationary in an earlier form.” That was the way
in which in these ancient times men spoke of the earth; for at the
same time, in truth, they spoke of the heavens.
From then on they
gradually came to speak of that which lies between the environment
and the earth. Now between the environment and the earth there lies
below first the earth itself, then the watery element, then the airy
element, then the fiery element. Thus the ancient peoples saw
everything which was on the earth in the aspect of the heavens;
and then came a middle epoch, which passed away in the first
third of the 14th century, when people saw everything in the aspect
of the environment, of the atmosphere. Then in the 14th and 15th
centuries came the great transformation, when man dropped with his
percept ions wholly on to the earth. The elements of water, air,
fire, were separated in man's consciousness. They were split up into
sulphur, carbon, hydrogen. Man then saw everything in an earthly
aspect.
Therewith begins an epoch which I indicated when we
spoke about the Hibernian Mysteries. There begins that epoch when man
embraces the earth with his knowledge and heaven becomes for him
something mathematical. He begins to calculate the size of the stars
and their movements and distances, and so on; the heavens become an
abstraction for him.
Not only had the heavens become an abstraction to man in
this third period. The image of the heavens in the living man is his
head, and what he can know of the heavens lives in his head; thus
since man learnt only to know of the heavens mathematically, which
means logically and abstractly, there lives in his head only the
logical and abstract; but from that time on there existed no further
possibility for man of drawing down the spiritual into his concepts
and ideas. So where man sought the spirit, there began that great
conflict between what he, can acquire with the intellectual content
of his head and that which the Gods sought to reveal to him of the
heavens; and most intensely and gigantically was this conflict fought
out, in the true forms of the Rosicrucian Mysteries in the Middle
Ages. There, in preparation for true knowledge, man was made to feel
the powerlessness of modern man.
This was indeed something which could be felt as mighty
in the circles of the true Rosicrucian initiation. What was so mighty
consisted in the fact that it was made clear to the pupil, not in an
abstract way, but in an inner living way: “You as modern man
can only enter the world of ideas; but in so doing you lose the
living nature of your own humanity.”
When the pupil felt that that which characterized this
new epoch could no longer lead him to what his true being really is,
he felt: “You must either doubt your own knowledge or you must
pass through a kind of death, a kind of killing of the pride of
abstraction.” The Rosicrucian pupil felt — that is, the
true Rosicrucian pupil felt as if the master had struck him a blow in
the neck, to indicate to him that the abstraction of the modern head
is not adapted for entering the spiritual worlds, and that the pupil
must renounce what is merely abstract, if he wishes to enter the
spiritual worlds. That was one mighty preparatory moment, in what we
may call the Rosicrucian initiation.
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