17. The Idea of Christ in Egyptian Spiritual Life

GA 87/1902-03-01/p031 ·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.

Now it is a question of making this priest a servant of humanity, so that already in this life he was brought a little further along the path of Osiris, that he did not merely transmit truth, but prepared his spirit, transformed it, so that what for others is merely external truth was for him a sacred truth, which was connected with quite different feelings and sensations. In fact, an Egyptian priest was something quite different from another person. He was a person who led a spiritualized, an internalized life because he had gone through the process of descending to the dead. He had left his body and had been in the realms of infinity, and after three days he had taken possession of his body again, awakened by the rising sun and by the father of heaven and earth, the god Ra. This process, which signifies initiation at the lowest level, was undoubtedly what the Essaeans also experienced in a higher degree. They knew the initiation process and undoubtedly took it over from Egypt with their views and customs.

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Cite: GA 87/1902-03-01/p031 · edition English