6. Experiences of Initiation in the Northern Mysteries

Through a special kind of training, one individual underwent with particular intensity the experiences arising from inner surrender, for example to the budding life of nature in Spring. Certainly, any human being can have something of the same feeling, but not with the necessary intensity. Therefore individuals were specially trained to place all their forces of soul in the service of the Northern Mysteries, to forgo all the experiences connected with Summer, Autumn and Winter, and to concentrate their whole life of feeling on the budding life of Spring. Others again were trained to experience the exuberant life of Summer, others the life characteristic of Autumn, others that of Winter. The experiences which a single human being can have through the course of the year were distributed among a number, so that individuals were available who in very different ways had strengthened one aspect of their Ego. Because they had cultivated one force in particular to the exclusion of all the rest, they had within them a superfluity of Ego-force, and now, in accordance with certain rules, they were brought into contact with the candidate for Initiation in such a way that their superfluity of Ego-force was transmitted to him. His own Ego-force would otherwise have become progressively weaker. Thus the one who in the process of Initiation was to experience the whole cycle of the year, lived through all the seasons with equal intensity; the Ego-force of these helpers of the initiating priest streamed into him so effectively that he was led on to a stage where certain higher truths connected with the Macrocosm were revealed to him. What the others were able to impart poured into the soul of the candidate for Initiation.