The Goddess - Rudolf Steiner - E-Book

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Rudolf Steiner

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Rediscovering the Goddess Natura; Retracing our Steps - Mediaeval Thought and the School of Chartres; The Goddess Natura in the Ancient Mysteries; The Goddess in the Beginning - the Birth of the Word; Esoteric Christianity - the Virgin Sophia; the Search for the New Isis; The Renewal of the Mysteries; The Modern Isis, the Divine Sophia.

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THE GODDESS

POCKET LIBRARY OF SPIRITUAL WISDOM

Also available ALCHEMY ATLANTIS CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUTZ THE DRUIDS THE GODDESS THE HOLY GRAIL

THE GODDESS

From Natura to the Divine Sophia

selections from the work of

RUDOLF STEINER

Sophia Books

All translations revised by Christian von Arnim

Sophia Books An imprint of Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, East Sussex RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

Series editor: Andrew Welburn For earlier English publications of extracted material see Sources

The material by Rudolf Steiner was originally published in German in various volumes of the ‘GA’ (Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized edition is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach (for further information see Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures)

This selection and translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 325 7

Cover illustration by Anne Stockton. Cover design by Andrew Morgan Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Introduction: Rediscovering the Goddess by Andrew J. Welburn

1. Rediscovering the Goddess Natura

Retracing our steps: medieval thought and the School of Chartres

The goddess Natura in the ancient Mysteries

2. The Goddess in the Beginning: The Birth of the Word

3. Esoteric Christianity: The Virgin Sophia

4. The Search for the New Isis

The renewal of the Mysteries

The modern Isis, the divine Sophia

Notes

Sources

Suggested Further Reading

Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures

Introduction: Rediscovering the Goddess

by Andrew J. Welburn

There has been a significant rediscovery of spirituality in recent years, especially concerning the feminine side of the traditions, which spoke of the goddess in her many forms. Myths and symbols from Egypt to Scandinavia, from India to Ireland have been explored and given real new life. Such a revitalization is welcome, and enriching — not least because it can also lead to a re-examination of our assumptions about the spiritual life more generally, going well beyond the mere carving out of a ‘feminist’ niche. For once we begin to look we find that this aspect of spirituality was emphasized and understood in many areas where we might not immediately think of looking for it. Thus we are made to challenge our own presuppositions.

For instance, Judaism has generally been represented as the most predominantly masculine spiritual stream, with its ‘Father’ God, its first man (Adam), its ‘patriarchs’, its stress on ‘Law’ rather than love, etc. And some have argued that Christianity had had to counterbalance its initial ‘masculine’, Judaic side by bringing in the cult of Mary, the feminine-motherly, the devotional. But in fact nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is true as far as it goes that early Jewish Christianity was phased out as the Christian Church developed, and increasingly took its mission to the Gentiles, to the Greeks and Romans and the other peoples round the Mediterranean rather than the Jews. Quite new ideas were needed in the process. But the theology of that early Jewish Christianity can be reconstructed by scholars from a number of sources that it left behind. And, perhaps to the surprise of many, one of its cardinal teachings was that of the feminine aspect of God, namely, his Holy Spirit.

In the traditions of this early Jewish Christianity, Jesus was said to have spoken of ‘my Mother, the Holy Spirit’. To become a ‘child of the Holy Spirit’ was the path that every Christian was invited to follow, certainly forming a strong relationship to this feminine side of God, from which we might evidently each hope to be ‘reborn’. Such traditions, it appears, continued to be especially associated with Jesus’ brother James.1 On the other side of the question, the origins of the devotion to Mary in Christian circles is very obscure, although it certainly figures already in apocryphal Gospels such as the second-century Protevangelium (again attributed traditionally to James). However, it received its great impetus later when Constantine became the first Christian Emperor (fourth century AD). In the Byzantine court, the Emperor was a nearly all-powerful figure, remote from ordinary people, approachable only through high connections and influential nobles. The only other route, for those who otherwise needed to appeal for his attention, was via his mother. Since the Christian Emperor was regarded as a substitute of God or Christ on earth, the cult of ‘the Mother of God’ (and indeed that of those other intercessors, the saints) grew up in obvious parallelism to the situation in the imperial court. Far from being a softening of Christianity’s hard, masculine emphasis, the emergence of this cult reflected above all Christianity’s involvement in power-politics, in pulling strings.2

The conceptions of the feminine in James’s traditions, now restored to us at least in part, are much truer to Christian origins, including its Jewish background. For there we already find a considerable body of ideas about a feminine aspect of God, namely, Wisdom, Sophia. In the Book of Proverbs, and in the other so-called Wisdom-books of the Old Testament,3 this power of God is shown as a feminine being who was a manifestation of his creative fecundity, sharing his inmost thoughts and communicating them to the wise and good:

By me kings reign, and rulers make laws that are just;

by me princes govern, and all nobles who rule on earth.

I love those who love me and those who seek me find me ...

The Lord brought me forth at the beginning of his work, before his deeds of old;

I was fashioned from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began.

When there were no oceans I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water;

before the mountains were set in place, before the hills, I was given birth,

before he made the earth or its fields or any of the dust of the world.

I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep.4

As God’s creative self-expression, it appears, it is as Wisdom that those with deeper insight can know the otherwise transcendent and inscrutable divine nature; and she is the aspect of God by which we can order our lives, rule wisely, love and be loved. In the Wisdom of Solomon (chs. 10-16) it is actually Sophia who is said to have guided and rescued humanity from the Flood, to have led the chosen people, etc.— all the things which are elsewhere attributed to God himself are here shown in their deeper reality to have been done through his Wisdom, Sophia, inspiring Noah, Moses and the other leading figures. Moreover, it is not hard to recognize in Wisdom’s words (such as ‘those who seek me find me’) the ideas to which Jesus alluded (‘Seek and you will find …’), in effect presenting himself as Sophia’s representative, perhaps indeed as her true ‘offspring’ on earth.5

The reality is not that feminine spirituality is missing from the Jewish and Christian tradition, but that it occupies a very special place there — a rather intimate, and esoteric one. Indeed Sophia is described in the Wisdom of Solomon in Mystery-terminology, as the archetypal ‘initiate (mystis) into divine understanding’ (8:4). One of the earliest forms of the myth of feminine Wisdom is that in the non-canonical Book of Enoch, ch. 42. There Wisdom goes out to the people of the earth, but finds them unwilling to receive her; unable to discover a place where she could dwell, she returns to heaven where she is still to be found by those who seek her, among the angels. But the meaning is not that she is inaccessible. Those like the Essenes who used Enoch believed that by obeying the will of God, human beings were taking their place among the ranks of angelic beings who fulfilled his commands and carried his messages throughout the universe. (Jesus may have meant something similar by his ‘Your will be done, as it is in heaven, so also on the earth’). Wisdom is attained, therefore, by those who take up their divinely ordained role in the cosmic order, and she will dwell within them. But the path is one of inner search, of inner struggles which to the Essenes were the ‘birth-pangs’ of spiritual regeneration. Nor could the rebirth be attained purely out of oneself. It was also necessary to wait for the right cosmic moment, or ‘turning-point’, when the inner birth would be possible.6

Behind the biblical and Jewish-esoteric figure of Sophia, therefore, we may discern a connection to the myths and cosmic rites which were enacted in the Mysteries of the ancient world. Contrary to the widespread assumption, these myths and teachings which brought humanity into harmony with the divine and natural order through processes of rebirth did not disappear from Judaism and Christianity. Indeed they took on there a new and significant esoteric life. There is certainly the danger that they may be lost sight of by conventional religious teaching, but that is not because they are absent. If anything they have even drawn more deeply within. They are part of the inner essence of religion which our time desperately needs to rediscover.

Rudolf Steiner led such a rediscovery of the Mysteries in their significance for our own time, and it is natural that in his work the Mysteries of the feminine as part of our relationship to nature and the divine should be fully recognized. In the ancient Mystery cults we already find, he points out, the figure of the ‘wise woman, the mother-principle, which gives birth to Wisdom’:

The woman stands for the power that is active unconsciously in the soul, that brings about the raising into consciousness of the divine element in humanity ... Here we have one of the central conceptions of Mystery-teaching, which acknowledges the human soul as the mother of the god, leading human beings unconsciously and with the inevitability of a natural force to their union with the divine.7



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