The Mystery Wisdom of Egypt

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher, esotericist, and clairvoyant. He is considered one of the greatest and most influential spiritual masters of the twentieth century.

The Mystery Wisdom of Egypt, the Rudolf Steiner’s study which we propose to our readers today, is taken from Christianity as Mystical Fact, a Steiner’s primitive and fundamental work, first published in German in 1902 under the title Das Christentum Als Mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums; an essay that, in Steiner's intentions, intends to demonstrate how Christianity was born from what had been prepared in the pre-Christian Mysteries. This is a theory that is certainly questionable and refuted by many philosophers and intellectuals, including Arturo Reghini and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, Christianity as Mystical Fact constitutes the foundation of Rudolf Steiner's thought and of the theories that he will later develop more completely on the nature of Christ and Christianity.

Christianity, in reality, was not simply a further and natural development of the wisdom and theological doctrines of the ancient mystery cults, but a completely new phenomenon, absolutely foreign to Western Tradition. A doctrine artfully crafted with the aim of social control and domination of consciences, destined to destroy the freedom and religious plurality that had characterized the civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Roman Empire for centuries.

According to Steiner, an utterance by Empedocles («When leaving thy body behind thee, thou soarest into the ether, then thou becomest a God, immortal, not subject to death») summarizes what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal element in man and his connection with the divine. Proof of this is found in the so-called Book of the Dead, which was deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth-century investigators. «It is the greatest continuous literary work which has come down to us from ancient Egypt. All kinds of instructions and prayers are contained in it, which were put into the tomb of each deceased person to serve as a guide when he was released from his mortal tenement. The most intimate ideas of the Egyptians about the Eternal and the origin of the world are contained in this work. These ideas point to a conception of the Gods similar to that of Greek mysticism».