in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha two Jesus-children were
born. The one was the Jesus who descended from the line of Solomon and
bore the Ego of Zarathustra. The other, coming from the Nathan line of
the House of David, was a very special Being. In the twelfth year of the
life of the latter the Ego of Zarathustra passed over into him...and from
that time until his thirtieth year the Nathan child with the Ego of Zarathustra
made himself ready to receive the Christ-Being. This event is indicated
through the Baptism in Jordan when Jesus of Nazareth was permeated by the
Christ-Being. At His death the Christ-Being poured Himself out into the
spiritual Earth-sphere, so that mankind may become more and more able to
participate in that which, proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha, can
pour forth spiritual forces into the souls and hearts of all men.
Rudolf Steiner,
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Steiner had a great deal to say about Christ. Not only did he distinguish between two Jesus egos (souls) as indicated by the above passage, but he was also always careful to distinguish between the human Jesus and the "Cosmic Christ". This Cosmic Christ was "the Spirit of the sun" before descending into the Earth at the crucifixion (the "Mystery of Golgotha") and giving humans the faculty of ego or full self-consciousness.
For Steiner, Christ is also one of the "Spirits of Form", which is a strangely low position on the Spiritual hierarchy. At other times though, Steiner seems to describe Christ as a much higher being. This inconsistency is never properly resolved in voluminous teachings.
As he matured, the figure of Christ came to assume a more and more important part in Steiner's cosmology. He believed the coming of Christ to be the cosmic (i.e. planetary - remember the limited compass of Steiner's cosmology) equivalent to effect on the individual of initiation into the mystery religions. The effect of the Christ on the individual Steiner see as being centred in the bloodstream and the region of the heart, producing an "etherisation of the blood".
When the individual had attained a correct understanding of the Christ, this etherised blood mingled with that of the Christ present in the cosmos. The Second Coming, he taught, would not occur on a physical but on a subtle, etheric level. Speaking in the early part of the century, he believed that this would occur in 1933, interestingly, the year Hitler came to power. Anthroposophists therefore believe that Hitler's role was to try to prevent the second coming of Christ and the consequent spiritualisation of the cosmos (or the Earth).
"The appearance of Christ as an Etheric Being in contradistinction to
the Physical Christ of Palestine." [The Etherisation of the Blood,
p.26] He suggests we have reached the time when the Etheric Christ,
which entered into the Earth in the "Mystery of Golgotha", will become
visible, at first to a small number of clairvoyant individuals, and then,
over the next three thousand years, to more and more people [Ibid].
The
Three Streams of Evolution
PRE-EARTHLY
DEEDS OF CHRIST - Rudolf Steiner - Pforzheim, March
7th, 1914
JESUS
AND CHRIST - Rudolf Steiner - Hamburg, November 15,
1913
Adam Kadmon -
a rather unusual interpretation - incorporates Steiner's concepts of Christ
- the "Adam Kadmon" in question has nothing to do with the Kabbalistic
idea of the original soul of Adam
or the Lurianic world of
Adom Kadmon
back to Rudolf Steiner main page
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