8.
Helena P. Blavatsky founded, with others, the Theosophical
Society in New York in 1875 and wrote various works which brought to
the Western public for the first time, the knowledge that this hidden
knowledge of the initiates still existed and was accessible to those
qualified to receive it. Among the truths she brought was the fact that
the story of Jesus Christ was not history but an allegory of the path of
initiation.
She did this, knowing that the 2160-year age of Pisces was
drawing to a close--preparing to give way to the Age of Aquarius--and
that civilized humanity was maturing, ready for a more direct knowledge
of the Mysteries.
Rudolf Steiner, growing up in Catholic Austria at the same time, became
aware of her work as he simultaneously achieved a degree of initiation
on his own. After beginning to give lectures in 1900 out of his own
occult discoveries, he was invited to join the Theosophical Society and
become the Founding President of a German Section.
He
did so in 1902, but by then he had published his view of the
relationship of Christianity to initiation knowledge, which differed
from Blavatsky’s. He said all ancient peoples had had an instinctive
clairvoyant perception of the spiritual world which over the ages
declined as they developed intellect, grew closer to the physical world
of the senses, and also developed ego, or a sense of “I”.
He
said all pre-Christian initiations had drawn on this instinctive
clairvoyance, but by the time of the Greeks even its remnants had become
decadent and unreliable. Initiation would have died out without a new
impulse. This came in the form that the Christ-Being, the Logos, for
the first and only time incarnated in a physical body, taking over the
body of Jesus at the Baptism and living in it for three years. During
that time, he lived out the drama of initiation as physical, historical
fact, imprinting it into the aura of the earth. He had left the Sun, his
home until then, and now resided in the earth. Through that fact,
initiation became possible in a new, free way, because Christ supported
the weak earthly ego as it tried to rise into initiation. Instead of
initiation only being accessible through atavistic clairvoyance tied to
a particular blood-line or race, it was universally open to every human
being who accepted that this Incarnation had occurred.
From
then until his death in 1925, Rudolf Steiner continued to elaborate this
view, while he broke with the Theosophical Society over the question of
whether Krishnamurti could embody this same Christ spirit, and in 1912
founded his Anthroposophical Society.
