Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres

GA 232 — 8 December 1923, Dornach

8. The Mysteries Of Hibernia II

It will be clear to you from the description of Initiation in the Hibernian Mysteries that the goal was to achieve insight into secrets of cosmic and human existence, for the experiences of which I told you were of very far-reaching importance for a man’s life of soul. Everything that is to lead him into the spiritual world depends upon conquests achieved as the result of crucial inner experiences and upon such a radical strengthening of his powers that in one way or another he succeeds in penetrating into that world.

We heard that in the process of Initiation in Hibernia, the pupil was led before two symbolical statues—but the word ‘symbolical’ must not be misunderstood. I described to you how these statues were constructed and also what feelings and inner experiences were undergone by the pupil while contemplating them.

You will realise, of course, that the direct impression made by such majestic statues under the conditions I described had an infinitely more powerful inner effect than one received from mere descriptions. Hence after the pupil had lived through everything of which I spoke yesterday, the Initiators were able to produce in him echoes, lasting for a considerable time, of what he had experienced from each of the statues. The echoes of his experiences from the female and from the male statues continued to resound for weeks, or periods differing according to the karma of the individual concerned. The pupils were exhorted in the first place to feel in themselves the after-effects of the male statue. The tests of which I spoke yesterday were made in front of both the statues, for their effects were intended to flow together and work on in the pupil’s life of soul. Now, however, the pupil was first instructed to allow the impression from the male statue to echo powerfully within him. I will describe this to you, but naturally one has to use words that are not really suitable for depicting experiences of Initiation and the inner meaning of many things will have to be felt intuitively.

What the pupil experienced to begin with when he gave himself up to the impressions of the male statue, was a kind of numbness, a rigid numbness of the soul which set in with greater and greater intensity the more often he was bidden to let the echo persist; it was a numbness of soul which felt like a bodily numbness as well. In the intervening periods he was able to attend to all the necessities of life; but ever and again Iris soul experienced the echo and the numbness. This numbness caused a change in his consciousness, for it was an actual Initiation which, though not altogether the same as in the older, primeval Mysteries, was nevertheless strongly reminiscent of them. One could not exactly say that the consciousness was dulled, but the pupil had a sensation of which he might have said: This state of consciousness in which I find myself is totally unfamiliar to me. I do not know how to deal with it; I cannot control it.—The pupil felt that in this state his consciousness was entirely filled with the sensation of numbness. Then he felt that what was numb and frozen—namely, he himself—was being taken up into the Cosmic All. He felt as if he were being transported into the wide spaces of the Cosmos. And he could say to himself: The Cosmos is taking me into itself!

And then came a remarkable experience—his consciousness was not extinguished but transformed. When this experience of frozen numbness and of being taken up into the Cosmic All had lasted for a sufficient length of time— and this was ensured by the Initiators—the pupil could say to himself something to this effect: The rays of the Sun and the Stars are drawing me out into the Cosmic All, but nevertheless I remain here, within my own being ... When tins experience had lasted for the necessary length of time, a remarkable vista came before the pupil. Now for the first time he realised the purpose of this state of consciousness which had set in during the numbness. For now, through his various experiences and their echoes, manifold impressions of winter landscapes came to him. Winter landscapes were there in the spirit before him, landscapes in which he saw whirling snowflakes filling the air—as I said, it was all seen in the spirit—or landscapes in which he gazed at forests with snow weighing down the branches of the trees, or similar sights, always reminiscent of what he had seen here or there in his everyday life, and always giving the impression of reality. After he had been transported into the Cosmic All he felt as if his own consciousness was conjuring before him long wanderings in Time through winter landscapes. And during this experience he felt as though he were not actually in his body, but certainly in his sense-organs; he felt that he was living with the whole of his being in his eyes, in his ears, also on the surface of his skin. And then, when his whole sense of feeling and of touch seemed to be spread over his skin, he also felt: I have become like the elastic, but hollow, statue.—He felt an intimate union between his eyes, for instance, and these landscapes. He felt as though in each eye the whole landscape at which he gazed was working, as though his eyes were an inner mirror reflecting everything outside him.

And further, he did not feel himself as a unity, but he felt his Ego, multiplied to the number of his senses, to be twelvefold. And from the feeling that his Ego had become twelvefold, a remarkable experience caused him to say to himself: There is an Ego which looks through my eyes, there is an Ego which works in my sense of thought, in my sense of speech, in my sense of touch, in my sense of life. I am really scattered over the world.—And from this experience there arose an intense longing for union with a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, in order that from this union, strength and power might be acquired for mastering the splitting of the Ego into the single sense-experiences. And out of all this, the question arose in the Ego itself: Why have I these senses?

The result of these strange experiences was that the pupil now felt that everything connected with the senses and with their continuations inwards towards the inner organism, was related to the actual environment around him on the Earth. The senses belong to the Winter—that is what the pupil felt. This whole life through which he was passing, in which the changing winter landscapes tallied, as I said, with what he had seen in everyday life, but which now appeared before him in great beauty out of the spirit—all these experiences the pupil now gathered together into a fundamental attunement and tenor of his soul—a condition which may be indicated as follows: In my Mystery-winter-wanderings I have experienced what is Past in the Cosmos. The snow and ice in my enchanted winter have revealed to me deathbringing forces and impulses of destruction in the Cosmos. And my numbness on the way to these Mystery-winterwanderings was the intimation that I was to behold those forces in the Cosmos which come over from the Past into the Present but in the Present are dead cosmic forces.

This realisation was what the echo of his experiences with the male statue conveyed to the pupil.

Then he was brought to the point where his experiences with the plastic—not the elastic—statue could echo within him. And now he was not overwhelmed by inner numbness but by inner heat, by a feverish condition of the soul, accompanied at first by bodily symptoms. The pupil was aware of great inner pressure; he felt as though both breath and blood were exerting too great a pressure and he became aware of a deep, inner need. And in this state the second experience he must undergo became clear to him. Born from the need felt by his soul, the realisation that came to him and of which he was intensely conscious, might be clothed in the following words: I bear within me something that my bodily nature demands in ordinary earthly life. This must be overcome. My Earth-Ego must be overcome!

Then, when the experience of this inner fever, this need of soul, this feeling that the earthly Ego must be overcome, had lasted for the necessary length of time, something arose in the pupil of which he knew that it was not the previous, unfamiliar state of consciousness but that it was a state well known to him, namely, the dream consciousness. Whereas from the earlier numbness had come the distinct feeling that he was in a state of consciousness unknown to him in ordinary life, he knew now that his consciousness was a kind of dreaming. He dreamed; but in contrast with his earlier consciousness—although again in harmony with what he had experienced—he had dreams of the most wonderful summer landscapes. But he now knew that these were dreams, dreams which filled him with intense joy or with intense suffering, depending upon whether what came to him from the summer was sad or joyful, but in either case with the intensity of feeling accompanying dreams.

You need only remind yourselves of how a dream can affect you. It first takes the form of pictures but you may wake up from it with a palpitating heart, in heat and fear. The Hibernian pupil interpreted this experience in an elementary, quite natural way, saying to himself: my inner being has brought the summer to my consciousness as a dream; the summer has come to me as a dream.

At the same time the pupil knew that what was in his consciousness, in a state of continual transformation like an enchanted summer, was indicative of impulses leading over to the Future of the Cosmos. But now he did not feel as though he were scattered into his senses and multiplied. On the contrary, he felt inwardly gathered into a unity; he felt held together in his heart. And the culmination, the supreme climax of what he was experiencing was this sense of being held together in his heart, this feeling of inner union with the dream of the summer—not with the summer as outwardly seen. And rightly the pupil said to himself: In what the dream of summer reveals and I experience in my own being, therein lies the Future.

The next experience arising in the pupil was of two conditions the one following the other. He was looking, shall we say, into a landscape of meadows and ponds, and little lakes. Then came a vista of ice and snow which changed into whirling, falling snow, into a mist of falling snowflakes. This mist became more and more evanescent and finally faded into nothingness. And the moment this happened, when he felt himself as it were in empty space, at that moment the summer dreams replaced the winter scenes, and he realised in full consciousness: now Past and Future meet in my own life of soul.

From then onwards the pupil had learnt to say of this outer world as a truth which was to remain with him for all future time: In this world that surrounds us, in this world from which we derive our corporeality, something is perpetually dying. And the snow-crystals of winter are the outer signs of the spirit that is perpetually dying in matter. As human beings we are not yet capable of feeling in all intensity this dying spirit which in external Nature is rightly symbolised in snow and ice, unless Initiation has been achieved. But through Initiation we know that the spirit is all the time dying in matter, announcing this in freezing, benumbed Nature. A void is continually being produced. And out of this void something is born, something resembling, to begin with, the dreams of Nature. And the dreams of Nature contain the seeds of the Cosmic Future. But Cosmic Death and Cosmic Birth would not meet if Man were not there in the middle. For if Man were not there—as I said, I am simply relating to you the experience inwardly undergone by the pupil during the Hibernian Initiation—if Man were not there, the processes revealed through the consciousness born from the feeling of frozen numbness would be an actual Cosmic Death, and no dream would follow, no Future would arise. Saturn, Sun and Moon would be there, but no Jupiter, Venus or Vulcan. In order that the Future of the Cosmos may be joined to the Past, Man must stand between the Past and the Future. This became known to the pupil through the experiences he had undergone.

All these experiences were then summarised by the Initiators. The first condition, that of the state of numbness, when the pupil had felt himself transported into the Cosmic All, was summarised for him by the Initiators in words which I can render to you as follows:

Thou shalt learn in widths of Space,
How in the blue of Ether-distances
World-Existence vanishes
And finds itself again in thee.

These words summarised the feelings that had been experienced.

Then the feelings accompanying the condition brought about by the second statue were summarised as follows:

In the Depths thou shalt unriddle
Out of burning-fevered Evil,
How the Truth itself doth kindle
And through thee its Being foundeth.

You will remember that at the stage of which I spoke at the end of the lecture yesterday, as the pupil was being realised, the words SCIENCE and ART appeared in the place of the two statues. The word Science appeared in the place of the statue which had said: I am Knowledge, but what I am is not real Being. And the word Art stood there in the place of the statue which had said: I am Phantasy, but what I am has no Truth. The pupil had known the terrible heaviness of heart resulting from his soul’s allegiance to something that was not truly Knowledge. For it had become clear to him that the knowledge acquired on Earth consists of ideas only, of pictures only, and lacks real Being. Now he lived through the reverberations of this experience and had come to realise that man himself must find Being for the content of his knowledge by losing himself in Cosmic Space.

Thou shalt learn in widths of Space,
How in the blue of Ether-distances
World-Existence vanishes
And finds itself again in thee.

For this was indeed the feeling. He had stormed into Ether-distances which are bounded by the blue of the infinite expanse and had united himself at last with this expanse. But then it seemed to the pupil that the Earth had become so dissipated in the infinite expanse that it was as though transformed into Nothingness. He had learnt to experience Nothingness by beholding the enchanted winter landscape. And he knew now that it is only Man who can stand firm in the infinite expanse leading to the blue of the Ether-distances.

Through the second experience a man realises that he finds in the depths of his own being what he must overcome, what he must face as the Evil that is rooted and surging within him, the Evil that must be overcome by the impulse of the Good in human nature in order that the world may have a future.

In the Depths thou shalt unriddle
Out of burning-fevered Evil,
How the Truth itself doth kindle
And through thee its Being foundeth.

The pupil had come to know that the tendency of Phantasy is to avoid Truth, to be satisfied with a relation to the world consisting of arbitrary, subjective pictures. But now, from the dreamlike, enchanted summer-experience he had acquired insight which enabled him to say: Whatever rises up in me as creative phantasy I can carry out into the world. Out of my inner being, like the pictures of phantasy, grow the Imaginations of the plants. If I have the pictures of phantasy only, then I am a stranger to what is around me. But if I have Imaginations, there grows out of my own inner self everything that I can then find in this plant, in that plant, in this animal, in that animal, in this man, in that man. Whatever I find in my own being is to be found in something that is outside me. And for everything that confronts me in the external world I can find something that rises up out of the depths of my own life of soul and is connected with it.

This sense of twofold union with the world was an experience which, accompanied by a feeling of inner triumph, came to the pupil as an echo of the experiences connected with the two statues. In this way he had learnt to expand his soul spiritually on the one side into the Cosmos and also to penetrate deeply into a region of his inner being where the forces are not working with the monotony customary in everyday consciousness but where they work as if they were only partly real, pervaded through and through with magical dreams. The pupil had now learnt to balance this intensity of inner impulses with the intensity of external impulses. Out of his experience of the winter landscape and his experience of the summer landscape, enlightenment had come to him concerning external Nature and his own essential Self. And he had become deeply and intimately related to both.

He was then prepared for a recapitulation of all his experiences. In this recapitulation his Initiators put very clearly to him what he must do: You must make a deliberate pause when recapitulating the numbness your soul experienced. You must pause while recapitulating the flight into Cosmic distances and again while recapitulating the experience of feeling dispersed into your senses and multiplied. You must be inwardly clear about each of these conditions and be able to distinguish exactly between them; you must have an etheric, inner experience of each of the three conditions.—And when the pupil, now with full consciousness, called up again before his soul the state of numbness, there appeared before him the experiences he had had before he came down to the Earth out of spiritual worlds, before the earthly conception of his body, when he was drawing together out of the Cosmos the etheric impulses and forces in order to clothe himself with an etheric body. In this way the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries was led to experience the final stage preceding his descent into a physical body.

He had then to recapitulate and add emphasis to the inner experience of being transported into the Cosmos. This time, in the recapitulation, he no longer felt as though he were being drawn up by the rays of the Sun and Stars but he felt as though something were coming towards him, as though from all sides of the Cosmos the Hierarchies were coming towards him; and he had other experiences as well. And then he became aware of conditions still further back in his pre-earthly life. Next, he had consciously to recapitulate the experience of being poured out into his senses and dispersed in fragments in the world of the senses. This brought him to the middle point of his existence between death and a new birth.

You can see from these indications that the powers enabling the Initiate to penetrate into these hidden worlds—to which, nevertheless, man really belongs—can be attained in the most diverse ways. And from the indications given yesterday and on many occasions you will realise too that vision of the supersensible world was achieved by methods differing widely in the several Mysteries. In later lectures we shall speak of why it was that such differences were considered appropriate, and why a uniform spiritual path was not adopted in all the Mysteries. Today I will merely mention the fact. But the purpose of all these different paths was to unveil the hidden aspects of world-existence and human existence which have been indicated again and again in our present studies as well as in other lectures and writings.

It was made clear to the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries that he must also recapitulate inwardly and in his life of feeling the other conditions he had experienced as aftereffects of the second statue; each condition was to be evoked in full consciousness. He carried out these instructions, and in recapitulating the state I described yesterday as a kind of need of soul, he felt what would be the soul’s experience after death.

Then came the vision of outer Nature as revealed in summer landscapes, but this was a dream. When he recapitulated this experience and now consciously distinguished it from the other, knowledge came to him of the further course of his life after death. And when he was able to make the experience of being held together in his heart vividly alive in his consciousness, his vision extended back as far as the middle point of existence between death and rebirth. Then the Initiator could say to him:

Learn to perceive in spirit
Winter-existence,
And thou shalt behold
he pre-earthly life. Learn to dream in spirit
Summer-existence,
And thou shalt experience
The post-earthly life.

Please notice carefully the words I have used, for in the relation between ‘beholding’ the pre-earthly and ‘experiencing’ the post-earthly lies the difference between the two experiences undergone by the candidate for Initiation in the Mysteries of Hibernia.

The place of this Initiation in the whole historical setting of human evolution, its significance in the evolutionary process and in what way a deeper meaning was indicated when at that stage of Initiation which I described yesterday, something like a vision of the Christ came to the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries—of these things I shall speak tomorrow.