Ancient Mysteries and Christianity

GA 87 — 19 October 1901, Berlin

1. On Heraclitus

Highly Esteemed Attendees!

As I have the pleasure of continuing this winter the lectures that I was able to begin last year, I have set myself the task of making the period that precedes the one I considered last year the subject of our contemplation, of considering it in so far as in this period lie the seeds of everything that later medieval mysticism produced in the first place.

[The booklet of last year's lectures, which is now being published, deals with German mysticism from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius]. Mysticism is to be understood by itself through the tremendously high spirits of the personalities who belong to this mysticism. If one delves into the peculiarities of the mystical teachings, if one gets to know the character of these teachings, the German mystics and the contemporaries of the German mystics, one can understand them personally and their teachings from within oneself. However, a completely different light is thrown on this later mysticism and its basically thoroughly esoteric teachings if one considers the preconditions underlying the Greek Mysteries and the Mysteries of the first Christian centuries.

First of all, German mysticism is linked to the mystery teachings, not only to what St. Augustine teaches, but also to the teachings of Scotus Eriugena, who was basically, more or less unconsciously, the great teacher of these mystics - of Nicholas Cusanus, Angelus Silesius, Meister Eckhart. So I think you get a completely different picture if you look at things from the Greek mysteries. Greek mysticism is an ancient primordial doctrine whose origins are lost in Greece itself until the eighth century BC.

However, these mystery teachings have [received] important influences from all mystery teachings: from the Egyptian, Persian and also Indian mystery teachings.

The Greek mystery teachings are very complicated. In order to gain an insight, [I first give] a historical view, because only through the certain historical facts can one penetrate into the actual basic wisdom of these teachings. I would therefore like to penetrate more from the outside to the inside: first the historically established, in order to then penetrate more and more into the actual secret knowledge of these Greek mysteries.

If we look at the matter historically, there were enormous difficulties until a few decades ago, because although we knew what a tremendous impression had been made on those who had been touched by [the Mysteries], we had no testimony from those who had been initiated. A testimony that must satisfy all would be that people of the Greek and Latin contemporaries saw their wisdom. But what the basis of this primordial wisdom may have consisted of is something we have not been able to understand properly until recently.

It is easier for us [to understand this] because we know how to see one of these spirits, who was deeply initiated, in the right light, who in the past, at least from our Western point of view, was taken for a philosophical thinker, which, however, according to our current knowledge, he was by no means just that.

I am referring to Heraclitus, who lived around the year 500 B.C. and who was deeply involved in the Greek mystery teachings because he was one of the initiates in Ephesus. Today we have a completely different idea of why this Heraclitus was called the "Dark One" right up to our own time. It is difficult to understand. Difficult, not because he wrote in a language that is difficult to understand. Because it is not his language that is difficult, but the actual inner meaning of what he has to say. It is not difficult in the sense that you cannot understand what he is saying, but in the sense that you have to know from which original wisdom he has grown. If you want to understand his teachings, you have to know from which primordial wisdom they were born.

So he lived [in the transition from the sixth to the fifth century] before the birth of Christ. What is said of him is that he taught that fire was the primordial principle, just as Thales had established water as the primordial principle. He also taught that everything "is in eternal flux, there is no "being, but an eternal "becoming. This is illustrated by the fact that he says that you cannot step into the same river twice. And so it is with all events in the world, with all facts.

Man, too, is in "eternal becoming. He is a different person at this moment than he was a quarter of an hour ago. Everything is in an eternal course, in 'eternal flux'. This is what is usually put forward by Heraclitus.

We now have two books which are still [a beginning], but which already show a deeper understanding. That is the German book by Lassalle and then the book by [Bywater]. Both must be consulted if one wants to understand Heraclitus. But Pfleiderer wrote what forms the basis of Heraclitus' understanding. He was able to write this because he still came from the Hegelian school and therefore still had an understanding of it. Pfleiderer pointed out in a really energetic way that Heraclitus was not a philosopher like Anaxagoras or Parmenides and others. These were thinkers that we can compare with other philosophers. Heraclitus should not be placed in this category, but must be understood in the context of the entire Greek spirit. He himself belonged to the family of the [Kodrides], he was the head of a branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which the purest and noblest cult was cultivated in that century. These mysteries, which we shall gradually become acquainted with, were regarded by those contemporaries who knew anything about them as places where one could find the greatest possible satisfaction of all human spiritual needs.

We have a [comprehensive] description of the impressions of contemporaries of what could be gained from the Mysteries. Most important, however, seems to me to be a testimony by Plutarch, who draws attention to this and says that these mysteries were actually only drawn down to a certain humanity. [Plato says]: Those who are initiated into the Mysteries are partakers of an eternal life, while the others, when they suffer death, must simply sink into the [mud].

How they understand the position of the Mysteries in relation to the scientific teachings, we get an idea from some passages in Aristotle. He says: "The participants in the Mysteries were less obliged to absorb a certain knowledge, less obliged to absorb certain substantive truths. These could also be acquired in other ways. They were more required to live within a certain circle of life and to absorb these things. - He therefore knew that it was not a question of teaching truth, but of experiencing truth. So it is not a question of having received truths, but of having lived them for such and such a long time and having lived with the truth in such circumstances. Life is what has been cultivated within the Mysteries. This is what Aristotle tells us.

Although [Pfleiderer] says that [Heraclitus] gave up the office of director in the branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries to his brother, we may assume that he was to be regarded as a leading personality and that he was one. And one thing indicates that he was one of the initiates. One work in particular, i.e. only individual pieces of this work, indicates this. The work was probably entitled "On Nature". This gives us an idea of what he said. He wrote this work in the temple of Artemis in [Ephesus] because he was convinced that he could only really find understanding in the circle of those around him. It should also be borne in mind that Heraclitus was not of a nature that wanted to engage with the views of the market, with views that prevailed among the masses. He did not mean only the quite banal truths of everyday understanding, of which he wanted to know nothing and which he considered to be a trivial matter, but he understood by it something that was far removed from the truth of an initiate. He also understood it to mean everything Homer said and all the Greek doctrines of the gods, which he rejected out of hand. He thought that it was best not to bother with Homer at all. Heraclitus is to be understood as if he detested the "great mobs" and led a detached existence.

We will gain a better understanding if we look at individual sentences of this work and examine these individual sentences. Here we have one that can illuminate Heraclitus' entire way of thinking in a flash: The senses, eyes and ears, are actually liars, and those who only want to experience through eyes and ears will never experience anything because they are barbarians of the soul!

We must not think that Heraclitus believes that the senses lie to us. No, he expressly emphasizes that it is through the eyes and ears that we get everything. We find mysteries everywhere, wherever we turn. He took the "everyday. That was mysterious enough for him, so he was less interested in seeking out the rarities, the oddities and solitudes of life. He believed that he who, like a blind man, like a dreamwalker, sees and hears only with his eyes and ears, is a barbarian of the soul, for whom it is impossible to awaken the soul to a higher existence. Heraclitus was convinced that all the views of the great multitude are nothing other than those gained through the external senses.

We must be aware that the religious views of Homer, Hesiod and other Greek poets also go back to deeper wisdom teachings that were found within the Mysteries and had been preserved there. But we must also remember that they had taken on a different form. Heraclitus reproached Hesiod in particular for the fact that he and other Greek poets had resorted to external forms, to pure sensory truths, and did not stand by the wisdom teachings that the Mysteries could have passed on to them. Heraclitus was initiated into the original form of wisdom teachings from which Greek mythology descends. Heraclitus, as a leader, was initiated into the ancient cults, in which the deepest foundations of Greek mythology were known in a completely different form.

We already have an idea of what was actually the keynote of what one was initiated into, even if there were people who did not yet know much about it; we come to this idea when we go into what is to be understood by the Greek mysteries. We learn [from Cicero] that these are not divine truths, but "natural ones". We must not misunderstand this. When it is said that we are not dealing with divine truths, we must realize that we could only be dealing with Greek gods. But it should be about deeper forces of nature, about the greatest that man can experience in a symbolic form, namely in the form in which the actual drama of man was experienced in the Greek mysteries. That which was to be revealed was the human being, self-knowledge.

This feeling of the whole person was a need: "Know thyself". That was the task the Mysteries had set themselves. Now Heraclitus stood within these mystery cults, and I therefore cite Heraclitus in order to gradually penetrate the mystery cults. I regard Heraclitus as an exquisite personality who was particularly deeply initiated into the secrets of the Mysteries. And on the other hand, he had a special ability to express the mysteries in a clear and classical way.

But now you can only understand Heraclitus if you look at him on the basis of what the Mysteries had offered him. The Mysteries were only accessible to select spirits. [However,] the mysteries we are told about were popular cults. The Eleusinian, the Orphic and so on, these were popular creations. That is why Heraclitus could have made the mistake of not wanting to know anything about all these mysteries. There are passages where he speaks just as sharply about the Mysteries as he did against Homer, Hesiod and others. On the one hand, he lays down his work in the temple of Artemis; on the other, he rejects these mystery cults.

If we now look at his words: 'There the Greeks celebrate Dionysus and depict him in obscene scenes - so that those who did not see deeper could actually only see something shameless in it. However, Heraclitus expressly emphasizes that these shameless scenes only appear shameless when viewed in their popular form, but that there is something important underlying them. - They can be forgiven because this Dionysus is nothing other than Hades.

On the one hand, Dionysus is the god of constant growth, the god of life, of pleasure, the god of debauched sex life. On the other hand, he also calls him the god of the underworld, the god of Hades. He regards these two as one and the same. The fact that Heraclitus regards the god of sprouting life and the god of death as one and the same entity is something he experienced within the mystery cults. The Mystery Cults were about evoking an idea that the common notion that life is in a perpetual oscillation must be overcome. Life comes and is replaced by death.

This idea, which man initially forms according to the impressions of his senses, is a first stage. This stage should be overcome. The matter will become even clearer to us if we consider a later word that I quoted from Jakob Böhme last year. It turned out that this word is nothing other than an interpretation of the Indian mysteries: "And so death is the root of all life."

Heraclitus saw that death is the same as life, and he therefore also saw the god of death in the god of life. He saw that there is no difference between life and death, saw that death is just another form of life. This is something that lives in the Mysteries and that also lives in Heraclitus. That is why Heraclitus says: By living [and by dying], we have living and dying in us. - Living is in dying and dying is in living.

Heraclitus, like the initiates, says: "Not once do we become and pass away, but we are in an eternal transformation, in an eternal weighing up and weighing down of all things." Even as the senses convey it to us. But he does not stop there, he says he sees how something new comes into being. He sees how death is only the great artifice to awaken life in the cosmos again and again.

This seems very simple in the ordinary world of imagination. But the great depth of feeling was awakened by the fact that people saw events through which they were taught how new things arise from death. It sticks much better when you perceive such processes with your senses, when you see them with your eyes. So sensual events were created in which one could recognize the great mystery of the equality of death and life.

This eternal being, this eternal life passing through life and death, is represented there. And when Heraclitus speaks of it and says that everything is in an eternal flow, then this appears to us as a deep basic current of his life. We also see that this "dark truth is born out of the deeper Greek wisdom of the mysteries. This mystery wisdom aimed to show that the sensory way of looking at things must first be overcome if the mystery character of truth is to emerge. This is the sentence: Life means nothing other than that we perceive with our eyes and ears what we can perceive. But we can also perceive this if we are animators of the soul.

For those who seek deeper wisdom, a time now begins in which that which is conveyed indirectly [through the senses] in the legends and myths comes to life inwardly. Nature does not begin to cease for him, nature does not begin to become colorless, as so many who cannot ascend think, because they only want to fill nature with dead, empty concepts. But Heraclitus says: one then receives a nature from the second degree, from second hand. - This is nothing other than what we find in later times as the nature reborn from the spirit, as it confronts us from the spirit of the German mystics. First it is gained from outside, then the spirit is sunk into it and emerges from it again.

This reborn nature is that which stands before Heraclitus as life, as a new nature. But it is not a life that has death and life in it, but that which has overcome death and life. That is the living thing in which he can see his god Dionysus and his god Hades as a unity. That is why he can also say that these gods are difficult to understand, because they are the expression of deep, profound truths. But these deeper truths are only accessible to those who perceive more deeply. To those who perceive only with the senses, they will remain a mystery, just as it will remain a mystery to them that the work [Heraclitus] had to be laid down in the temple of Artemis.

Pfleiderer, in what he wrote about this in his writings, said that Heraclitus had gained such views from the Greek mysteries. And I can say that we find these views again in Plato, then also in Pythagoras and others. These then passed over into the later views.

Now something else happens. We hear Heraclitus speak of Pythagoras as he spoke of Hesiod earlier. He says: "Much knowledge does not teach the mind, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras - and enlivened them. Heraclitus was therefore convinced that Pythagoras did not belong to those who were initiated into the Greek mysteries. Pythagoras [of all people] was most interested in proclamation, like a scholar. He sought to gather his own wisdom from it: 'Much knowledge is a bad art.

Now, however, we must realize that what we know as Pythagorean views and mystery cults also contain wisdom, just as Heraclitus did. Pfleiderer could not solve the riddle that lies hidden here because Pfleiderer was not clear about the relationship of Heraclitus and Pythagoras to the Mysteries in antiquity. Heraclitus was initiated into the Greek primal mysteries, into those cults which can be traced back to the eighth century before the birth of Christ and then disappear, but which only lived in Greece itself. Heraclitus became acquainted with Pythagoras when Pythagoras was nothing more than a scholar; Pythagoras [later] became acquainted with wisdom in the Orient and was fertilized by it. Pythagoras then returned to Greece with this oriental wisdom and was then able to recognize what Heraclitus meant. Likewise Plato.

We therefore have a more comprehensive teaching of the mysteries with the Greeks, while with Heraclitus we have the oldest, the most original ones.

Heraclitus is said to have regarded fire as the origin of all things - on the one hand; the eternal becoming and undulating, the eternal flow, the basic characteristic of the world - on the other.

This was difficult to understand. It went so far that even Lassalle could not explain that Heraclitus understood fire as a symbol for something other than the becoming of the world. It is meant to symbolize the external weighing up and weighing down. But he meant that fire should be nothing other than an external symbol. Just as a lion [as] a symbol [of] bravery, Heraclitus would have used fire to mean the inner restlessness, the actual spirituality of things. We have never really got over this idea, because we have not exhausted the full scope of the fact that Heraclitus stood on the foundation of mystery wisdom. But if we try to do so, we will understand how he came to make the seemingly external material the primordial ground of the world. We can only understand why Heraclitus comes to the fire when we penetrate the mysteries. We need only go into the outer Orphic Mysteries. We then find that since the eighth century before the birth of Christ the view prevailed that fire arose from eternity, from eternity seen in the spirit. This fire is not only seen as an external substance, but at the same time as the spirit that permeates the whole world. Love on the one hand, spirit on the other. Within the Greek mysteries, "fire" also means "love" and "spirit". There was nothing other than this idea and that the external talk [about such a] restless element as fire is overcome when one no longer sees merely with the senses, but when one also sees with the spirit and grasps the spiritual. Thus for the seekers in the Mysteries [everything] was transformed into a supersensible, spiritual element. When they then spoke of fire, they were no longer speaking of something that they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, but they were addressing the love that permeates the whole world; [it would have evaporated] into that. Therefore it must be clear to us that when Heraclitus speaks of fire, he does not mean ordinary fire. Thales, when he speaks of water, speaks of real water. But when Heraclitus speaks of fire, we must not understand such a substance by it as Thales does by water. We must seek out the meaning of it in order to know what he means by it. He speaks of nothing other than this nature reborn in the spirit. He expresses this only with the old familiar word "fire, and its meaning can be known to those who know the Greek mysteries. Only if you understand the matter in this way will you have a correct idea of it.

German scholars such as Schleiermacher, Pfleiderer, Teichmüller and others have pondered this for a long time. They have not been able to find a satisfactory explanation of how this inner spiritualized doctrine is connected with Heraclitus' view that everything derives from fire. But if [the] world [is] based on fire, there is no longer any difficulty.

We can only understand Heraclitus if we regard him as an initiate into the world of the Greek Mysteries, and conversely we can get an idea of what was sought in the mystery cults if we understand Heraclitus' teachings in the right way.

Now we will also understand what it means when Heraclitus speaks of fire and why he rebukes the Greek poets because they understand and describe the world in a completely external way. He rebukes Homer because he describes that there is fighting in the world, while people should strive for peace, since a peaceful state should be established in the world.

Heraclitus had another view that sprang from the Mysteries. In addition to the eternal One, the "eternal love, they also allow the strife, the "struggle to be born out of the primordial [existence]. Where there are opposites, balance can only be found in a higher harmony. Strife, says Heraclitus, is the father of all things. - Only from strife can a higher harmony emerge. The image [of the lyre and the bow, the image in which] forces that oppose each other [find their harmony] in a higher harmony, this image becomes the image of the world for him. Thus Heraclitus does not seek the primordial ground of the world in an empty harmonious unity. Rather, he seeks the greatest possible opposites and tries to dissolve them in a higher harmony. Now he rebukes the Greek poets for describing day and night, war and peace and so on. [Heraclitus says: God is day and night, God is war and peace. Hunger and satiety and so on. But he transforms himself. His views are like mixing [embers] with incense. One sight is called fire, love, the other is called fight and strife. - Heraclitus has been called the "Dark One"; fire is probably related to this. One may have called him this, the other that.

Heraclitus, however, also expresses the view that above the multiplicity of ideas that man can form about the primordial causes of existence, there is basically only one unified primordial all-being, that above the greatest opposites of existence there is only the greatest unity. Thus, on the one hand, he regards conflict as the essence of all things. In strife the opposites are at war with each other, but they dissolve in the highest harmony. Heraclitus only sees this ultimate insight realized in true self-knowledge. In this respect, Heraclitus is the first great personality to recognize that self-knowledge is the highest knowledge of the world. That is why we find in Heraclitus - anticipated by the Occident - the first important personality to recognize that the highest truths can be found within man himself, [that the true self is not the individual self. One has become myst]. Then Heraclitus says what the individual self is, and continues: "Since I have become a man, it is not the individual man who speaks, but the general spirit of the world, the Logos, who speaks in me. The Logos begins to speak when nature has been reborn in a higher nature. It then appears as self-knowledge. But this does not deliver the self of man, but the essence that underlies everything. That is why he says: The general world reason, the Logos, speaks from me. - And whoever has risen to this point of view is considered by him to be ten thousand. He also says that he only listens to the one who is an [excellent] one.

Now we also encounter in Heraclitus what we encounter in all such personalities, [and what probably sounds like arrogance and immodesty], in that he says: "I know everything." By this, however, he probably means nothing other than the following: When I was still a boy and a youth, I saw with sensual eyes and heard with sensual ears, I perceived with my senses. When I became a man, I saw things [as they are] in the second nature, [as they are] in the Logos. - But he was still limited. He therefore says: I did not mean that I was always seized by all wisdom. I meant: I know how to look at the universe. - He did not mean that he sees everything, nor that he sees more, he only meant that he sees what others see in a sensual way in a different, spiritual way. This became possible through self-transformation, through the transformation of the individual self into the universal self. He saw out of the universe into the universe. This is what Heraclitus believes he achieved when he said: "I know everything in myself [now]. - At the same time, he had reached the point where he could say that he had attained that intimate union with the higher self, where knowledge had been transformed, where it was no longer an external view of the things that confront you, but had taken on a different form, where knowledge had taken on the form that he had intimately united himself with things. [The lower cognition consists in the fact that we stand as individual human beings in outer space. The other consists in the fact that we stand outside of space, that we see with the eyes of the universe], so that this small self expands into the general world-self. We can use Goethe's words [with which he replies to the Philistine saying] "No created spirit penetrates into the interior of nature" etc. ["We think: place by place: ["We think: place by place we are within." So he says:] There is no within and no without; what is within is without and no without; what is within is without.

Heraclitus had reached this level of knowledge. He expresses it in an image [by] saying that he who sees as he does sees the world [with the gaze] of a child at play. This word has often been misunderstood. That the world is for him as the playing child sees the world is to be understood in such a way that just as the playing child has nothing to do with anything but itself, so that the toy belongs to it as it were, so that it accomplishes with it nothing other than what it itself needs, that it has no other purposes to accomplish, so also the man who has reached a higher stage is only subject and object, which have to do with each other, which are inwardly [enclosed] with each other. Heraclitus compares this with the image of the child at play. This is often interpreted in such a way that one says: He means that one must view the world aesthetically, as an artist. This is also the case in Kühnemann's book, where the matter is presented as if Heraclitus had only professed aesthetic views. This image [of the child at play] is intended to represent nothing other than the point at which the dividing wall between the personal self and the All-Self no longer exists.

So we have become acquainted with a personality who inspires tremendous interest, who appears of tremendous profundity and the greatest acumen at that time, but who is of great value because what has come down to us from this personality gives us the first insights into the Greek mysteries and shows us how they have manifested themselves over the centuries. It sheds light on this search for truth by the ancient Greeks.

Behind the outer Greek mysteries, and also behind the inner ones, are mysteries that still exist today.

Until Philon, the matter must be viewed historically; only from Philon onwards can it also be viewed inwardly.