All listeners, atheist, agnostic or theist, will discover much of interest in Steiner's brilliant prose. The influence of Mystery Wisdom on thinkers such as Plato, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras is brought to life as Steiner explains how the initiate of the Mystery temples, such as those at Eleusis, ten miles from Athens, learnt to differentiate between mere knowledge and a wisdom that went beyond the transitory, phenomenal world of appearance to noumenal reality.
Psychologically the initiate came to believe 'he was himself a product of his daimon' and that he could not accomplish complete unity with the cosmos via the word or logos, but with the help of his daimon, he could (symbolically) die and be reborn. As Cicero said (making a distinction between popular religion and the deeper gnosis of the mystic), '[From the Mysteries] we learn the nature of things rather than that of the gods.' Steiner argues that Christianity was built on the foundations of a pre-history that many have forgotten while making acute observations about many historical figures such as Xenophanes, Empedocles, Plutarch, Plotinus, Pindar, Sallust, the neo-platonists, Zarathustra and the early church fathers.
Through Steiner, we recognise how Mystery Wisdom saturates Homer's Odyssey and how for Christians, the Cross of Golgotha is the Mystery cult of antiquity condensed into a fact.
Editorial note: As one of our listeners noted, an unedited file was mistakenly uploaded for this audiobook. Our apologies, the last five minutes of the original recording have now been replaced with a corrected version.
(Tags : Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity (Unabridged) Rudolf Steiner Audiobook, Rudolf Steiner Audio CD )
