First Lecture

We visualize the Cabeiri altar of Samothrace. The Cabeiri that stood on it as external monuments were sacrificial jugs, which now contained not fermental substances but substances that human knowledge could find if it could penetrate into the inner spiritual of the substance. The substances in the sacrificial jugs, sacrificial substances, were ignited, the smoke rose, and the magical language worked in such a way that in the rising smoke appeared the imagination of what the word intoned. Thus, in the sacrificial smoke, the path up to the divine powers became visible on the outside. In the sacrificial smoke, the priests knew themselves in the atmosphere through which transubstantiation was performed. That was the third stage in the development of the mysteries and of what is contained in the Act of Consecration of Man.