1 66 @ The Secret Li@ of Nature
Rome and its second king, Numa Pompilius, the Egyptian mysteries
made their way to western Europe, overlaying the original Chris-
tianity. By the fourth century c.E., with the establishment of the
Roman church; the basic idea of the mysteries-that human beings
could become like unto God out of their own inner strivings without
the intercession of the Church-was regarded as heretical, a notion to
be combated by a murderous Inquisition. Masons teaching facts about
the nature and inner life of humanity could be-and were-burned
alive. Hence the great need for secrecy. Had one person betrayed, it
could place the rest of a lodge in danger of being what Leadbeater calls
'tjudicially murdered," a method of politico-religious control that has
seldom flourished so exuberantly on this planet as in our days.
Looking back into very ancient times, Steiner sees the mysteries as
institutions of people still possessed of the faculty of instinctive clair-
voyance. "Ancient humanity could still gaze into the spiritual world
whence the human being descends into his physical body on earth."
By the thirteenth century almost no one in the West had any direct
clairvoyance capable of perceiving and distinguishing among the spir-
itual beings. Some of the early Christians, says Steiner, had personal
knowledge of the spiritual worlds, but popular religion became ever
more superstitious and corrupted by magic."Even such a great thinker
as Thomas Aquinas had no clairvoyance, and no personal knowledge of
the hierarchies."
Throughout the dangerous Middle Ages the mystery tradition sur-
vived in mystical currents such as the Grail, the School of Chartres, the
Cathars, the Templars, or other such secret societies, surfacing again
only when persecution became less fierce. Rosicrucian successors to
the Templars kept the secret wisdom alive in small groups of powerful
but self-effacing initiates. Steiner, himself an initiated Rosicrucian, tells
an extraordinary story about the thirteenth-century origins of this re-
markable brotherhood, attributing its creation to a dozen reincarnated
sages of post-Atlantean times, the seven Holy Rishis, joined this time
by five later sages deliberately chosen to revive the wisdom of the
Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Christian epochs.
This hermetic council of twelve, aware that external Christianity had