The Mystery of Golgotha

[Dover]

The soul we forgot.

Golgotha, E. Jerusalem is the site of the Cruxifiction



THE MYSTERY OF GOLGOTHA .............

How shall we come once more to the Supersensible — to the Spiritual that transcends the world of sense?...

A lecture delivered in Manchester College Chapel, Oxford, on August 27th. 1922. Authorized translation from the German of Notes unrevised by the lecturer.
Published by kind permission of Frau Marie Steiner.

By RUDOLF STEINER

MANKIND is reaching out to apprehend the Mystery of Golgotha once more with all the forces of the human soul; to understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilisation, but so as to unite with it all the forces of man's being. But this will only be possible if we are ready to approach the Mystery of Golgotha once more in the light of spiritual knowledge. Intellectualistic knowledge can never do justice to the full World-impulse of Christianity. For such knowledge only takes hold of the thinking life of man. So long as we have a Science whose only appeal is to our life of Thought, we must derive the sources of our Will (and these for Christianity are the most important) from our instinctive life, and cannot realise their true origin in spiritual Worlds.

Thus it will be indispensable to turn attention in our time once more to this the greatest question of mankind, inasmuch as the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth lies in the Mystery of Golgotha. I would fain express it in a parable, however strangely seeming. Imagine some Being descending from another planet to the Earth. Unable to become an earthly man, the Being would in all likelihood find the things on Earth quite unintelligible. Yet it is my deepest conviction, arising from a knowledge of the evolution of the Earth, that such a Being — even if he came from distant planets. Mars or Jupiter — would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper. For in this picture he would discover that a far deeper meaning lies hidden in the Earth, — in earthly evolution. Beginning from this deeper meaning which belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being from a distant world could then begin to understand all other things on Earth.

We men of to-day little know how far we have gone in intellectual abstraction. We can no longer feel our way into the souls of those who lived a little while before the Mystery of Golgotha. They were very different from the souls of men to-day. We are apt to imagine the past history of mankind far too similar to the events and movements of our day. In reality the souls of men have undergone a tremendous evolution. In the times before the Mystery of Golgotha all human beings — even those who were primitive, more or less uncultured in their souls, — perceived in themselves something of the essence of the soul, which might be thus described: They had a memory of the time the human soul lives through, before he descends into an earthly body. As we in ordinary life remember our experiences since the age of three or four or five, so had the human soul in ancient time a memory of pre-existence in the world of soul and spirit. In a deeper psychological sense, man was as if transparent to himself. He knew with certainty: I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to the Earth. Notably in still more ancient times, he even knew of certain details of the life of soul and spirit which had preceded his descent to Earth. He experienced himself in cosmic pictures. Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. Descending as a soul from yonder spiritual World, I entered the dwelling of a human body.” Never did the man of ancient time unite himself so closely with his human body as to lose this awareness of the real life of soul.

What was the real experience of the man of ancient time in this respect? It was such that he might have said: “I, before I descended to the Earth, was in a world where the Sun is no mere heavenly body spreading light around, but a dwelling-place of higher Hierarchies, of spiritual Beings. I lived in a world where the Sun not only pours forth light, but sends out radiant Wisdom into a space not physical but spiritual. I lived in that world where the stars are essences of Being — Beings who make felt their active will. From yonder world I descended.”

Now in this feeling two experiences were joined together for the man of ancient time: the experience of Nature, and the experience of Sin.

The old experience of Sin: the modern man has it no longer. Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature. For the ancients the duality was non-existent, of natural law upon the one hand, and moral on the other. All moral necessities were at the same time natural, likewise all natural were moral. In those ancient times a man might say, “I had to descend out of the divinely spiritual World. Yet by my very entry into a human body — compared to the World from which I am descended — I am sick and ill.” Sickness and Sin: for the man of olden time these two ideas were interwoven. Here upon Earth man felt that he must find within himself the power to overcome his sickness. Increasingly the consciousness grew on the souls of olden time: We need an Education which is Healing. True Education is Medicine, is Therapy. Thus there appear upon the scene shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha such figures as the Therapeutæ, as the healers. Indeed in ancient Greece all spiritual life was somehow related to the healing of humanity. They felt that man had been more healthy in the beginning of Earth-evolution, and that he had evolved by degrees farther and farther from the Divine-spiritual Beings. “The sickness of humanity” was a widespread conception, forgotten as it is by modern History, in that ancient world in which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed.

It was by turning their gaze into the past that the men of those ancient times felt the reality of spiritual things. “I must look back beyond my birth, far into the past, if I would see the Spiritual. There is the Spirit; out of that Spirit I am born; that Spirit must I find again. But I have departed far from Him.”

Thus did man feel the Spirit from whom he had departed, as the Spirit of the Father God. The highest Initiate in the Mysteries was he who evolved in his heart and soul the forces whereby he could make manifest the Father in his own external human being. When the pupils crossed the threshold of the Mysteries and came into those sacred places which were institutions of Art and Science and of the sacred religious Rites at the same time, and when at length they stood before the highest Initiate, they saw in him the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher Initiates than the “Sun-Heroes.”

Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha the Father Principle held sway. Yet it was felt how man had. departed ever more and more from the Father, to whom as we look up we say. Ex Deo nascimur. Mankind stood in need of healing, and the seers and initiates lived in expectation of the Healer, the Hælend the healing Saviour. To us the conception of Christ as the Healer is no longer living. But we must find our way to it again, for only when we can feel His presence once more as the Cosmic Physician, shall we also realise His true place in the Universe.

Such was the deep-seated feeling in human souls before the Mystery of Golgotha, of their connection with the spiritual world of the Father. A strange saying coming down to us from ancient Greece — “Better to be a beggar upon Earth than a king in the realm of shades” — bears witness, how deeply humanity had learned to feel the estrangement of their being from the world of Spirit. Yet at the same time their souls were filled with a deep longing for that World.

But we must realise that if a man had gone on evolving with the old consciousness of the Father God alone and unimpaired, he could never have attained the full self-consciousness of the “ I ” and inner spiritual Freedom. Before he could attain true spiritual Freedom, something had to take place in man, which, in relation to his primæval state, appeared as sickness. All humanity was suffering as it were the sickness of Lazarus. But the sickness was not unto Death; it was unto liberation and redemption, unto a new knowledge of the Eternal within man.

..cont'd

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/MysGol_index.html



Golgotha by Munch

[cliss]

1. Thanks, Dover.

[stellanoir]

2. If one buys into the crucifixion story which I'm not at all sure I do,

Yeshua ben Joseph never said that he would expire for the redemption of the sins of only those who accepted him as their personal savior.

He allegedly died for ALL of our sins if one bothers to buy into that stuff.

It and other things drive me truly bananas.

Yikes.

Never mind.

[skater314159]

3. Thanks for posting this Dover!

This is a great article... one thing I found very interesting is that the original lecture was given in 1922, or before the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered. The article sounds like he was talking about the energies and vibrations that we now associate with Pluto in Astrology!

Thanks for this great post.

:hippie:
skater314159

[Dover]

4. Hmmm....that's interesting. Hadn't made that connection. Thanks! n/t

[cliss]

5. Some more info -

===============
What was this journey about? What did you learn or bring back from the experience that was not there before? BTW - if you are uncomfortable with sharing that here (understandably) feel free to either PM me or post it in the Astrology forum (same article posted there).

An eclipse experience casts a 'strange' light upon the earth, often accompanied by a similarly 'strange' feeling or mood shift. Perhaps the awe we feel is part of our ongoing and collective memory that Steiner alludes to, in reverence for the power of the Divine that it and all of nature and the universe represent. Those 'feelings' remind us of our connection to that Divine source. I've had dreams of experiencing eclipses directly (looking directly upon them), which left me with an indescribable feeling of peace and wholeness as the two celestial bodies became one.
=====================
Dover, I'm not sure what this was all about. It happened about 10 years ago, completely spontaneous, and it lasted about 30 seconds. ...wish I had more to report.

Eclipses.
I always thought that eclipses were the harbinger for some really bad times ahead. I never thought of them as benevolent, or a feeling of peacefulness (?)

=====================
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there was an Eclipse at Golgotha (see below)

http://articles.christiansunite.com/article2702.shtml
Much has been written about these hours of darkness, much which is not warranted by any careful spiritual attention to the story itself. You will call to mind how, at great length many years ago, it was argued that the darkness was that of the sun's eclipse. But that is entirely impossible, for Passover was always held at full moon, when there could be no eclipse of the sun. The darkness has been described as nature's sympathy with the suffering of the Lord, but that is a pagan conception of nature, a conception of nature as having some consciousness apart from God and out of harmony with His work. It has been said that the darkness was brought about by an act of God, and was expressive of His sympathy with His Son. I admit that that is an appealing idea, and has some element of truth in it, in that we may discover the overruling of His government; but to declare that that darkness was caused by God because of His sympathy with His Son is to deny the cry of Jesus which immediately followed the darkness and referred to it. The darkness was to Him a period when He experienced whatever He may have meant by the words, "Thou didst forsake Me"-Matthew 27:46. If I have succeeded in these words spoken in reverent spirit, in suggesting to you the difficulty of those central three hours, then our hearts are prepared for going forward.

[Dover]

6. Some say eclipse, others a supernatural event or miracle.

A literal reading of the Bible can be quite empty of meaning. But if one clings to a certainty connected to material reality, then this can be the only way to see it.
For instance the tearing in half of the temple's veil is hardly referring to a physical veil or temple and to read it that way is to miss the meaning.

Well, thanks for sharing your story. Perhaps you have yet to discover its significance for you, or perhaps it was just a witnessing situation. Mysterious!