Initiation or Consecration

I would like to present in the form of a dialogue what has always been said to the students of occultism in such secret schools. I am telling you this to clarify the principle, the method of initiation. What I am expressing in a few words takes a long time to learn. The dialogue I describe never actually took place, but what it represents has always taken place in every spiritual school. The student is told: Look at the plant, which points its roots into the earth and lets its stem, leaves, and flowers grow upward, and compare it with the human being. You would be making a false comparison if you tried to compare the head with the flower and the foot with the root. As an aside, I would like to say that even the person who laid the foundations for modern science in such a magnificent way came to this view. He compares the root with the human head and sees the plant as the inverted human being and the human being as the inverted plant. The root is the head that the plant stretches toward the center of the earth, just as the human being can stretch his head, which he holds in the opposite direction, toward the sun or the celestial forces of the universe. The plant's reproductive organ, the flower, from which the seed for a new plant emerges, turns chastely toward the sunbeam, which in medieval secret schools is called “the holy lance of love,” which touches the ovary and, after fertilization, conjures up the new plant germ, which causes the plant to grow in that direction. Humans are exactly the opposite. They stretch their fertilizing organs toward the center of the earth, their heads out into space. In between, the student is told, is the animal, which makes a half-turn so that its spine is horizontal. Look at plants, animals, and humans, and you will understand Plato's statement that the world soul is nailed to the cross of the world. By world, Plato means plants, animals, and humans. The plant stands upright, opposite it is the human being, who turns his gaze with his head toward the free world ether, and the crossbeam is the animal. This is the archetype of the cross, which was known in ancient times and in all secret schools.