Forewords to The Great Initiates

Foreword to the first German edition (1907)

Some time ago, Edouard Schuré's drama “The Children of Lucifer”¹ was published in German. The plot and characters of this work of art stand out from the intellectual currents of the fourth Christian century. At a particularly characteristic point in human development, Schur& wanted to portray the two fundamental impulses of the struggling human soul, one that perceives itself as divine in origin, and the other that perceives itself as divine in its future. Christ, God incarnate, and Lucifer, man struggling for divinity, stand as if in the background of the drama and give it a life that Goethe wanted to point to at the end of his “Faust” when he addressed “all that is transitory” as its “parable.”

This work of art was born of a fantasy that feels itself to be the child of a higher human spiritual power. Goethe also spoke of this higher spiritual power. He says that through the development of his abilities, man can rise to a height where his spirit no longer sees merely the images of created things as in the mirror of science, but where, by living into the work of creation, he allows the archetypes to arise within himself. In his restless pursuit of unity, Goethe's mind's eye always saw the end point of a distant perspective in which insight and art, knowledge and imagination meet at the heights of the human spirit. For him, truth and beauty came from a common source. A search for truth that is deep enough penetrates beyond the surface of things to the eternal ideas that are not shadowy abstractions, but the living creative forces of nature itself. And a genuine work of art springs from an imagination that is not born of human caprice, but is fertilized by those very eternal creative forces themselves. Thus, for Goethe, high art became a revelation of secret forces of nature that could never be revealed without it. Artistic imagination and wise insight thus point to a power of the human soul hidden behind them, in which they are both one.

The true mysticism of all times has recognized this soul power in the seer. Knowledge that goes beyond ordinary human thinking penetrates to the level where ideas dissolve into that element from which artistic imagination is born, mostly in an unconscious way.

Among the creative artists of the present day, GA 4a Schur£ is one whose entire approach is based on the insight into what the seer is in the spiritual development of humanity. For him, all human creativity ultimately leads back to the power of the Schurs. They are for him the mediators between the “transient,” which is a ‘parable’ to him, and the “eternal,” which opens itself to “spiritual vision,” that higher unity of wisdom and imagination. Schuré has now described his own pilgrimage into this realm in the book that is hereby presented to the public in German. The fact that it has gone through nine editions in French is proof that there are people today whose souls seek access to those heights of the spirit.

Schuré is inspired by the belief that a future of spiritual culture lies ahead, in which science will struggle through wisdom to recognize the seer of truth, and that art will experience an era in which the fertilizing power of the eternal archetypes of things will reign behind the imagination. His artistic work is based on this confidence, and this book has also grown out of it. It speaks of the “great enlightened ones,” the “initiates,” who have looked deeply behind things and from there have given great impulses to the spiritual development of humanity. It traces these greatest spiritual deeds from Rama, Krishna, and Hermes to Pythagoras and Plato, in order to show in Christ the union of all these seerly impulses.

What emanated from there lives on in contemporary culture. The light that streams from Schur's book is therefore also enlightening for all those who want to root their souls in the spiritual foundations from which strength and security for present-day life can be drawn. Those who understand the religious needs of our time can also recognize the blessings that Schur's book can bestow in this regard. It offers historical proof that the essence of religion cannot be separated from the concept of “initiation” or “enlightenment.” The need for religion is universal to all human beings. A soul that believes it can live without religion is caught up in a serious self-deception. But only the messengers of the spiritual world, who rise to the highest levels in the land of Scher, can satisfy this need. As true as it is that religions are ultimately capable of revealing the greatest truths to the simplest hearts, it is also true that their starting point lies where fantasy sheds the cloak of illusion and becomes imagination, so that the highest reality is revealed to it; and where the search for truth becomes inspiration, to which not the reflection of thoughts but the primal light of ideas speaks. By describing the great founders of religions as the highest initiates, Schuré reveals the religious development of humanity from its deepest roots. In the future, the essence of “initiation” will be understood when insight into this essence is gained from the great religious phenomena of the past.

There is much talk at present about the limits of human knowledge. It is said that this or that must remain closed to human beings because they cannot go beyond a certain circle of knowledge. In the future, it will be understood that the circle of human knowledge expands as human beings develop themselves. Things that seem unknowable enter the realm of knowledge when humans develop the cognitive abilities that lie dormant within them. And anyone who has seriously gained confidence in such an expansion of human cognitive abilities has already set foot on the path that leads to the “great initiates.”

Schur's book is one of the best guides for finding this path in the present day. It speaks of the deeds of the enlightened ones, which can be recognized in the spiritual history of humanity, and it leads from these deeds back to the souls of the enlightened ones themselves.

Today, there are two means of gaining access to the language of those who, from their experience, can tell us about a spiritual world. One way is to listen directly to the sources that still flow from the primordial ground of existence in the present. The other way is that offered in Schur's book. For many, the latter means will probably only lead to the former way. Once they can convince themselves that the great spiritual impulses of the past, which still live on in their souls, sprang from seerly powers, then they will also be able to bring themselves to trust that it is possible to attain this power in the present as well.

Those who can follow the spiritual life of the present not only on its surface but also in its depths will also be able to see how, after the ebb of materialistic currents from many sides, the sources of spiritual life are opening up. Precisely those who clearly see this will not deny the temporary necessity of materialism. They will know that

this materialism had to arise in recent centuries because only under its one-sided influence were the external successes of culture possible. But such a person will also see how a new age of spirituality is dawning.

We believe that one of the best manifestations of this dawning spiritual age is Schuré's “Great Initiates,” which we are presenting to the German public. We count the author of this work among those who are boldly advancing in the dawn of this age. The power that emanates from his research into the souls of the great initiates has given him the courage and freedom necessary to write a bold book such as this one. Dr. Rudolf Steiner. Preface to the second German edition (1911)

When, relatively recently, the first edition of this German translation of Schuré's “The Great Initiates” was presented to the public, it was on the assumption that this work would find readers of the same kind in this translation as it had found in such large numbers in its French original. The fact that a second edition can now appear shows that this assumption was well-founded.

Edouard Schuré, the profound author of “The Great Initiates,” speaks to those souls who long to raise their eyes to the great pioneers of human intuition in order to fill themselves with the ideas that have been revealed throughout history and that can awaken in every human being the inkling of solutions to the riddles of existence.

In our time, there is a wealth of scholarly literature available on some of the personalities Schuré discusses in this book. And many popular writings make the findings of this literature accessible to a wide audience. Schuré's brilliant portrayal offers something quite different from this literature. It speaks through a personality who penetrates with intuitive insight into the workings of the soul forces embodied in human beings. This personality is able to lift the reader to the horizon of eternal thoughts, the realization of which is the true history of humanity.

It was GA 4a Schur& who illuminated the focal points of humanity's spiritual development in The Great Initiates, whose mysterious workings had been the subject of research by the greatest minds in Germany since Herder. This author combines the most devoted manner of exploring the great world ideas with the power of reviving effective ideas that lie dormant in the womb of time for the intellect, but are eternally present in the human soul. It is for this reason that this book, in its French form, has been reprinted in rapid succession and has brought rich powers of deepening to the inner educational life of our time, the “life of the soul.” (In France, the 23rd edition has just been published.)

With these thoughts in mind, this book is now being presented to the public in a new German edition.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner. Preface to the third German edition (1918)

With these words, the first edition of Edouard Schuré's book “The Great Initiates” appeared in German translation in 1909, followed by a second edition in 1911. In these fateful times, a third edition is necessary. French writers today pass harsh judgments on German intellectual life out of turbulent passion. I believe that within German intellectual life, no one with true discernment will take offense if the same words that were written in times of peace out of a sense of cooperation between the German and French spirits appear unchanged at the beginning of this book. Based on the feeling that Edouard Schuré is close to German intellectual life, I wrote in 1911 that the ideas in his “Great Initiates” echo the current of development that ties in with Herder and Goethe. I sense much that is German in the Alsatian Edouard Schuré. While working through The Great Initiates, many thoughts often seemed to me to have been translated from the German perspective. I then had to think that Schuré wrote Histoire du Lied, a history of the development of German lyric poetry, as one of his first books. By not translating the word “Lied” for German lyric creation into a French expression, he felt how German lyric poetry had, in a certain sense, flowed uniquely from the depths of the German spirit. Schuré also wrote a book about Richard Wagner's spirit and art. It is noticeable that many of the ideas that inspired him in that book are echoed in the present book. However, the content of Schuré's book certainly belongs to those universal human spiritual values that transcend what divides peoples. Berlin, July 1916. Dr. Rudolf Steiner.