The Mysteries of the East and of Christianity

GA 144

Foreword

Foreword by Marie Steiner

[ This excerpt is not contained in the 1972 translation but is included in the German volume.]

On the first edition of the book

Even before the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, when materialistic life in Europe was at the height of its external power, there were souls scattered everywhere who were searching for a way out of the bourgeois dullness of life and fleeing into various movements, hoping to find spiritual inspiration or forget the tormenting questions about the meaning of existence. They turned to idealistic-social, political-revolutionary, sectarian, or Tolstoyan movements, solely to give their existence a purpose beyond the narrow confines of personal life, to escape the tormenting questions about the meaninglessness of an existence whose boundaries are supposed to be birth and death and physical corporeality. Science had no answer to these questions; the intellect capitulated before them, but in its narrow-minded arrogance, it referred the rebellious soul back to these barriers with a categorical imperative. With stubborn determination, it believed it had to persist within the circular labyrinth in which sensory perception held it captive, and considered it amateurish to want to break out of this circle and shake the gates of the mind. Increasingly burdened by the heavy encrustations of everything that a dead intellectual life had brought to the people of the present, the human ego stood freezing and helpless before the closed gates of the mind.

From the twilight of ancient times, many words rang out that seemed to point the way forward. Mystery knowledge had existed in earlier times. There were places that were closed to the profane. People entered them at the risk of their lives, after undergoing strict tests and making vows, and no news of the mysterious events that took place there ever penetrated the outside world, unless it was punished by death. But cultures emerged from them, leaders of states and their advisors, religions and their founders, art and wisdom teachings. And so history took shape under the powerful influence of what emerged from the mystery centers, and one culture followed another, opening up ever new areas of the struggle for existence to human beings, at the same time carrying the individual human soul from branch to branch on the ladder of human development, into its own inner being, out of a dull collective life into a conscious individual life, so that it may grow strong within itself and return to the collective life as a strong ego.

In this way, all those trials must be endured through which alone man can grow. And here also lurk the dangers, but by overcoming them, man can become knowledgeable. Self-conquest is the first goal of this trial; the great danger is that of losing oneself.

But so many people are in danger of this today: countless individual souls who feel their ego disappearing more and more, youth who are perishing from this inner death and creeping through the world like living corpses, humanity who, frightened, suddenly find themselves in the midst of an economic crisis in which their humanity is in danger of being lost, in which humanity must capitulate to the machine.

But into this danger of losing human dignity and human affirmation, the voice of mystery resounds loudly and clearly once again. Unlike in the past. For the mystery and its proclamation have also changed. It had receded into the night of concealment, seemingly silenced after it had been fulfilled in the deed of Golgotha. Through this, it had stepped out of the sacred precincts of former seclusion and down into the broad life of humanity. It had taken place before the eyes of the world. This marked a turning point, the beginning of a new phase in the working of the mysteries.

The old mystery had fulfilled its task. The mighty and great, slowly prepared, the meaning of earthly evolution had shone forth as an event, as an achievement. What continued to live on from the old mystery centers, if it did not connect with the new impulse, could only preserve itself in external formalities, which then led to decadent distortion. Decadent distortion is soon taken up by the forces of evil, enters into a covenant with them, and breaks away from the pure archetype. The hidden pure core of being must seek other forms of expression. Away from the stage of external human events, no longer bound to specific locations, far from the hustle and bustle of church and worldly affairs, a new esotericism arose, whose task was to lead the human ego to conscious awareness, to grasp itself, to recapture the spiritual world through the forces of its own free will.

Unknown to the outside world were the hidden places where the mystery knowledge appropriate to the times was cultivated. It was no longer at the center and background of the culture that poured outwards. Its rays acted as if conducting the heartbeat of world events in a hidden chamber, bringing life into the spiritual blood circulation of humanity. Attempts were often made to suppress this life that urged people to wakefulness and freedom. The states and churches that were averse to it and did not want to see their worldly power threatened, even the still existing representatives of the old mystery tradition, who behind the scenes of historical events were still a guiding power, albeit bound by political and self-serving goals, and wanted to remain so, are hostile to it. For it has the power to lift people out of their differences, out of their separation into nations, economic circles, and classes, and to lead them to unity and community. This must be prevented for the sake of special power goals. But life that springs from the spiritual source cannot be killed. It somehow breaks through all the obstacles thrown in its path.

And today is such a time when the mystery must speak to all people. Humanity cannot help itself out of its confusion unless it is given the opportunity to gain this knowledge. In the work of Rudolf Steiner, which is the sacrificial deed of the strongest genius of our new age, explanations are given, corresponding to the state of consciousness of today's humanity, about the connections between those world-encompassing spiritual events that have always taken place behind the visible facts of history; but also everything that the humanity of the future needs in order to break out of the prison of their narrow self-existence and, overcoming egoism, attain inner freedom, pass through the gate of knowledge into the world of the spirit, to which we belong inwardly.

Another way to regain our human dignity, another way to find the human being within us, who is to be taken from us according to the will of the forces opposing human progress, so that the animal in us may triumph or the demon of the machine may strangle man, there is no other means than the knowledge of the ever-ruling transformation of form, substance, and consciousness, which is experienced in human events and cultivated in mystery.