The Mysteries 9 167
degenerated through the Church into a caricature, determined-as
Steiner reconstructs the events, presumably from the Akashic Re-
cord-to revive the world's great religions into a healthier synthesis,
using as their avatar a young man they considered the reincarnation of
either the apostle Paul or one of his close associates.Again the method
was to pass on the highly developed etheric body of this prodigy, en-
dowed with all its accumulated wisdom, to another sensitive in the
next century, a young German, Christian Rosenkreutz, who was to
originate the succeeding line of Rosicrucian masters. In this strange
manner the same powerful etheric body could be used to reincarnate
from century to century until it reached the Comte de St. Germain in
the eighteenth.
In the nineteenth, what Steiner calls "the soul forces" developed by
Christian Rosenkreutz in the thirteenth century served, he says, to
found the theosophic movement. According to Easton, it was not until
just before the end of the KaliYuga dark age, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, that any reliable knowledge of the primeval wisdom
could once more be made available to man, motivating Blavatsky and
Steiner to begin to reveal some of the teachings in an appropriate form.
And it was "the strength radiating from the etheric body of
Christian Rosenkreutz" that is credited by Steiner with providing the
inspiration for Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled. The stanzas of Dzyan that she
included in The Secret Doctrine contain, says Steiner,"some of the deep-
est and most significant pieces of wisdom, much of which originated
with the teachings of the Holy Rishis and flooded into the sacred lore
of the East." To which he adds more soberly that much ofwhat is to be
found in the stanzas will only gradually be understood in all its depths
by the majority of people.
In ancient times two forms of initiation led to the mysteries, called
by Steiner the Jonah and Solomon initiations. In the former the candi-
date was put to sleep so that his soul could leave his body to travel three
days in the supersensible world. In the Solomon form the candidate re-
ceived revelations in a "sublimated trance condition."
One of the clearest expositions of the mysteries practiced in
modern times comes, as might be expected, from Geoffrey Hodson, to