Egyptian Initiation Wisdom: The Four Gates of Esoteric Development

GA 266II — 20 February 1912, Stuttgart

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

The development of the world and the development of human beings always go hand in hand, and anyone who enters an esoteric school must also take their time into account. However, since one comes into contact with the eternal values of development through esoteric development, something has passed through the esoteric schools of all ages, including pre-Christian ones, such as the Egyptian school, that also has lasting significance for the student: words that today's students can understand just as well as those of that time. Such words from that time are the following, which, translated into our language, mean approximately the same:

I have come to the gates of death;
I have come to know the four elements;
I have seen the sun at midnight;
I have come close to the upper and lower gods;
I have returned to the outer world.

What does it mean to say, “I have come to the gates of death,” etc.? In our meditations, we will gradually come to feel that we have a dual personality, that our ego no longer belongs to what we have identified with until now: the physical body. When a person dies, it happens quite naturally that they no longer consider their physical body to belong to them. However, they must already have achieved this through training before they definitively separate from this body. If a person had developed as the good gods intended, they would have directed their body from outside. If, for example, a human being had wanted to travel from one city to another, he would have directed his body there by a magical influence of will from outside. His body would have been like a weight belonging to him. We can make this idea clear to ourselves if we imagine that a Martian were suddenly transported to Earth and the first human being who came to meet him was carrying a weight in each hand. The Martian, having never seen a human being before, would think that these two weights were part of the human body. In the same way, we consider ourselves far too much a part of our bodies. If we train ourselves properly, we will increasingly feel that our ego is split and that one part directs the other from outside. As we come into contact more and more with the high creative beings through our elevated ego, which we should feel as grace in humility, we may find that we identify this ego more and more with these high beings; for we are so imbued with ambition and vanity that we do not even suspect it. There is a good remedy for counteracting this vanity.

When the predecessors of human beings on earth, the Elohim, appeared, how did they do so? They did not reflect themselves in their glory full of vanity. The Bible tells us that they created and then looked at their deeds and saw that they were good. So we should look at the deeds of our ego, at what the ego has accomplished; then we will see how little good there still is. Take our handwriting, for example. It is an expression of our ego, a part of us that we put out into the world. No one is so vain as to find everything about their handwriting beautiful. And so, upon reflection, we can find many of our achievements to be quite inadequate upon closer inspection.

What does it mean to I have come to know the elements? The first element in which man was created was warmth. And actually, during the development of the earth, it was intended that man should send streams of warmth from outside into his body. The summer warmth and winter cold that he now experiences in his body as an individual human being should, so to speak, be felt by him as his ego flowing in from outside. They should feel this “I” as connected with all other “I's.” The fact that the warmth is now drawn into us, into our blood, is Lucifer's doing.

The second element with which we are closely connected is air. We should actually feel that the air outside is ourselves, that with every breath we take, it flows into our bodies and revives them. Instead, we feel the air as something coming from outside us and give it back as something poisoned, as something that kills. And it is in this killing air that Ahriman confronts us. However, we should identify ourselves so little with our respective personalities that even if we learn about our previous incarnations, we should regard them only as stages in our journey. We should never say: we were this or that. For in doing so, we confuse our eternal self with something transitory.

We identify only with the other two elements, the solid and the liquid within us, the physical body and the blood. We perceive these as ourselves.

Record B

Four sentences from the Egyptian initiation are given to you,¹

whose meaning must still be understood by esotericists today.

I. I had to pass through the gate of death. The experience is this: feeling one's body as a weight that one carries.
II. I had to learn about the elements.
II. I was allowed to see the sun at midnight.
IV. I was very close to the upper and lower gods.

Saying from the Egyptian Mysteries

I have come to the gates of death;
I have learned about the four elements;
I have seen the sun at midnight;
I have come close to the upper and lower gods;
I have returned to the outer world. I went to the border of death
I entered Proserpina's threshold And after I had passed through all the elements,
I returned again. At midnight I saw the sun shining with
bright white light. I stepped before the lower and upper gods
face to face and worshipped
them from close up.