Introduction to Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha

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Revision as of 23:36, 13 December 2018 by anthrop>Diederik

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) is really a reference lecture for the MoG, and overlaps with this chart. So together these two lectures really represent an excellent starting point. We now want to go from the raw material (lecture texts) to a more structured non-sequential approach that we can extend to a browseable

Now how to proceed? First I propose you read this page which briefly describes the intended process.


Quite practically the proposal is then that you read this first lecture, 'parse' its contents, and keep this chart alongside and/or (even better but not obliged) draw your own high level scheme (try to stick to one page) .. to see how it provides a picture of the various aspects covered.



Overview.jpg

















We can now segment the 'territory' covered (rather artificially but not arbitrarily) into seven topics or themes (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 the two-three lectures (listed above), and then deepen our understanding by adding inputs from other lectures.


The schematic also shows on the outskirts, surrounding the lecture content .. some grey text boxes. These contain a short description with some keyword labels for some more advanced points related to each of these fields. We will connect to these if we continue and extend our study.

As we learn through the process, the interrelationships will become clearer. The goal is to 'initialize' our base understanding, so we have a foundation to build on. In the next phases we can then continuously extend the territory covered by adding perspectives to shed light on the so-many aspects of the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ Impulse.