17. The Idea of Christ in Egyptian Spiritual Life

GA 87/1902-03-01/p008 ·1902-03-01 · English High

Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Auch wenn die Mitschrift noch nicht die später übliche Genauigkeit aufweist» (Even though the transcript does not yet have the accuracy usual later). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 87), which calls the cycle the earliest of which a listener's transcript exists. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

What does this process of initiation mean? One must first be clear what the whole basic idea of initiation is. According to the views of the Egyptian priesthood, it was intended to introduce people to the deepest secrets of existence, to the primal mysteries of the world. It is therefore the introduction of those who were admitted to initiation into that which was carefully kept hidden from the great multitude by the Egyptian priests and which was only communicated to those who wanted to make progress. Those who wanted to rise to the highest truths that could be conveyed in the Egyptian priestly schools and cults, to descend to the depths of the mysteries of the world, could only do so in a precisely prescribed way, because it was believed that only those who had gone through the entire sequence of stages could have the inner life to have certain views alive within them.

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Cite: GA 87/1902-03-01/p008 · edition English