Introduction to Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha

Where to start, when one wants to get an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Rudolf Steiner touched on it in - literally - many hundreds of lectures. There are so many angles to shedding light on this, that it becomes intimidating trying to lecture or cover the topic. Here's just a first grab of some full cycles:

• GA97 - 1906-7 - The Chrystian Mystery
• GA116 - 1909-10 - Christ Impulse and the development of ego consciousness
• GA131 of 1911 - From Jesus to Christ
• GA152 in 1913-14 - Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha
• GA 175 in 1917 - Building stones for an understanding of the MoG
• GA187 - 1918-12 - How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?

Because we need to start somewhere as a first step in our intended comprehensive approach, we choose two key lectures as the best introduction to the Mystery of Golgotha (MoG). Below is an overview chart of the 1906-12-02-GA097 that we propose as a logical mindmap to structure our approach. The second lecture of 1907-04-01-GA096 (which was preceeded by a preparatory lecture on 1907-03-25-GA096) overlaps with this chart.

Now how to proceed. The proposal is that you read the lecture, and maybe keep this chart handy to see how it provides a picture of the various aspects covered.

We can segment the 'territory' covered (rather artificially) into seven topics (see digits in whiteblue), with a short description in the yellow text boxes.

1. – unification of humanity through brotherly love
2. – what was the nature of the being that went through MoG?
3. – zooming out .. evolutionary framework where MoG fits in
4. – the Mystery of the Blood (special fluid, purified, etherization, link with higher ethers)
5. – initiation as spiritualization and the Mystery of the Heart - the Old Mysteries (of the Spirit) and the New Mysteries (of the Son)
   
6. – the Holy Grail, Parsifal, nature’s yearly cycle in plant kingdom (subconscious nature of impulse)
7. – a new beginning, a new center and Sun, change of astral atmosphere Earth

We can now go into each of these and start with a synthesis of what we learn from these two lectures.Then we can deepen our understanding by adding inputs from other lectures.

The schematic also shows on the outskirts, surrounding the lecture content .. some grey text boxes where we can take each topic if we continue and extend our study. These keywords are labels for some more advanced points related to each of these fields.