The Mysteries

He feels anew the faith of all on earth,
The power of salvation streaming thence;
But as he looks, he feels his very soul
Pervaded by a new and unknown sense:
Who added to the cross the wreath of roses?
It is entwined by blooming clusters dense,
Profusely spreading just as though they could
Endow with softness e’en the rigid wood.

While light and silv’ry clouds, around it soaring,
Seem heavenward with cross and roses flowing,
And from the midst like living waters streaming
A threefold ray from out one core is glowing;
But not a word surrounds the holy token,
The meaning of the symbol clearly showing.
And while the dusk is gath’ring grey and greyer,
He stands and ponders and is lost in prayer.

At last he knocks. The myriad stars above him
Look down with shining eyes as they appear.
The portal opes, and he is bidden welcome
By brethren wont to comfort and to cheer.
So he relates how far by hill and valley
The will of higher Beings led him here.
They stand amazed, for well they see their guest
Was sent to them by heavenly behest.

They crowd around him, and their inmost being
They feel by a mysterious power stirred,
Their breath they hold to listen, for he rouses
An echo in their hearts with ev’ry word.
Like deepest lore, yet uttered by a child,
The wisdom flowing from his lips is heard:
He seems so innocent, like crystal clear,
As though descended from another sphere.

The Mysteries, Goethe

Bridge of Twilight

Face to face and silver silence

Fills the spaces left between us.

In the mind our eyes will wander,

See therein love’s sweetest pleasure.

Nerves are bad – my tongue is frozen –

Still my heart is speaking volumes.

In our veins the blood grows warmer;

By degrees the sun gets nearer.

How can I make real what’s happened

There between us, in the dream world;

Lest we find a hidden moment

Just to slip within the ocean?

So, the truth– there’s no denying –

When I’m with you all is fading

To a pale, unfocused shadow,

Of itself, while you are shining

Like a star.

But I must hide this

thrill I feel

when you’re beside me.

When we meet I’ll give you kisses,

Brush each cheek in swift succession.

As my scent becomes your aura,

Both your arms could pull me closer.

Charismatic Rays just blind me,

Touch upon my racing heartbeat.

Hold me tight – I’ll melt in stages –

Sink into the sea of changes.

Now you know the slightest trigger

Might unleash a storm within me,

Bring us into new dimensions.

When we kissed I learned you simply

Make me whole.

Now I must wonder,

How can this be put asunder?

Maybe when the days have lengthened,

Reached a point – mid-summer’s evening –

We shall find ourselves reflected,

There – upon the bridge of twilight –

In the waters deep and tranquil,

Streams that mingle, once divided.

While I watch you speak my eyes fall

Down onto your mouth, as always;

Search your face and try to listen,

Try to stop myself from losing

All control.

I long to kiss you.

Both my lips are wet from wanting

You.

You feel the nervous tension

And it makes you want to draw me

Near –

Upon your knee, quite slowly,

Smile and laugh to soothe the tempest.

Throw your arm around my centre,

Cast a whisper in my shell-like

Ear,

And see the stars in my eyes;

See the way you rock me, world-wise.

Feel the way my thighs, relaxing,

Curve around your hips like liquid.

Then my arms uncoil, like vine leaves

Wind across your chest and shoulders.

As I breathe you feel me quiver –

Shake inside and out, get shivers –

Hairs on end are poised for action,

Secrets of this wild attraction

Are revealed.

At last you see me.

Now you know the love flies freely.

No more ghosts -our worlds, dissembled –

Merge as one while we just tremble.

Draught of Forgetting

When Dawn broke my sleep with a light, golden spear,

Out peeled the bell o’er my hypnotised head.

My eyes opened wide as I sat up in silence,

Raising the silver shield up from my bed.

The bright, ruby ring I had plucked from the deep stream –

Blood of a rosebud that sparkled in my eyes –

Finely it glimmered, a star pink as sunrise.

By the night river of clear running water,

I had watched servants weave garlands of wonder,

Maidens make ready for dancing and feasting,

Faerie-folk tending the flowers of summer.

Somewhere were singing the undines…. A page-boy

Whispered of treasure to those who could listen,

Spoke of a ring that endowed one with wisdom

All who would go there were seeking this treasure –

Moonlight enraptured the realm of enchantment –

Nowhere directions for those without vision –

Lost beyond time in a place of deep dreaming.

Fed by the fountain of memories, like snow-flakes,

They watched without seeing in shadows of knowing,

Drank without thinking a draught of forgetting.

The Temple

The temple has stood since primeval times; it is the place of initiation of human souls; to ‘enter’ it means simply to acquire the knowledge of the sublime plan of cosmic evolution.

To be initiated does not mean to know all things; no one can do that, not even the beings of the spiritual hierarchies. It means, rather, to perceive in a single survey the main outline of the evolutionary movement of everything.

This survey is made possible by the suprasensory ‘buildings’ of the Temple of Wisdom, constructed on the lines of intuition. The ‘buildings’ of the temple (if we imagine them as visible shapes) form an inverted bowl, out of which the seven streams of revelation flow.

These streams are the pillars of the temple, and the bowl is the dome. The seven pillars of the House of Wisdom, about which Solomon spoke, are also seven paths, or methods, of absorbing the streaming contents of the bowl, or the temple’s dome.

Valentin Tomberg, Christ and Sophia

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it’s age-old pain,
It’s ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours – And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Rabindranath Tagore

Guardian of the Threshold

Everyone must face and deal with the three temptations. However, if one approaches the spiritual world across the ‘threshold’ that is guarded by the ‘Guardian’, then one has the task of recognising the forces of the three temptations in one’s own being and of ridding oneself of them.

This means leaving them on this side of the threshold while one’s consciousness is still on the other side. For this, one must become free of the body in one’s thinking (thinking must become ‘body-free’); feeling must become free of the influence of chance; and willing must be cleansed of the lust for power.

If, for example, one were to carry lusting after power across the threshold into the spiritual world, one could thereby bring about tremendously destructive effects. For the will is strengthened to such a degree in the spiritual world, that it manifests in ways of which a person in the state of consciousness on this side of the threshold has no inkling.

Therefore the Guardian of the Threshold stands on the threshold and shows us our double. That is, the Guardian shows us our subconscious, reveals it to us so that we have before us an unerring and true picture of the extent and inner constitution of all the powers that we carry within us – powers that entangle us in the three temptations of existence.

if we are brave enough to withstand this sight without despairing over our own nature, without losing all courage so that we become, as it were, living ashes – if we have the courage to endure this truth – then we can cross over the threshold. Transformations then occur within our thinking, feeling and willing.

Indeed, one’s thinking becomes something quite different from what it was before. Until then, if we reflected upon something in order to draw logical conclusions, our thinking flowed onward from one thought to the next.

Now it becomes transformed into a stream directed upward. A thought becomes a question that ascends to the hierarchies and with persons who have died – then we return with the answer and recall it upon awakening in ordinary consciousness. Thought becomes an answer. The power of thinking becomes the power of vertial memory.

Feeling, for its part, is transformed. It becomes no longer the expression of what one feels with regard to oneself. Instead, it becomes an ever-widening circle that takes up not only what one has in one’s soul as impressions and sensations from without, but also what lives as missions and tasks within other beings.

Airs of a beautiful kind

I lifted up skyward the crown of the faeries,
Tarnished by oceans of sea-crossing time.
Forged in the fire of golden-days dawning,
Lit with a halo of stars in the night.

Who now shall wear it? I wondered in silence
Una is resting with Duessa at play.
Gwenevere wanders in halls of forgetting,
Deep in the summer of dreaming this day.…

On her feet sandals of gold, steps the princess,
Floating on air through the green garden grass,
Walking alone by the castle of ether,
Seen but unseen by the world through a glass.

The seal of the nether-world opened up freely;
Through the dark tunnel with reason behind,
Following meekly the one with a mission;
Perfect in will and a reader of signs.

Once past the stream of the guardian lizards,
On through the gate to the bright other place,
Land of reflection and fathomless knowledge,
Home elemental of alchemic race.

Where do we go? I looked left and then eastward,
Somehow forboding the place that I saw.
Life’s university, building of sandstone
Burnished and gleaming, a prison by law.

Silent, but knowing, did reason stand sweetly
Holder of mysteries, the teacher and guide.
Younger and wiser and older all-seeing,
Dressed up in white and demure by my side.

Then came a voice – and as if out of nowhere –
Do you need help, you seem lost in this realm?
There stood a faerie, bewitchingly golden
Silken and spun was her hair from the sun

Stepped forth the reason – seduced by her magic –
Stretched out a hand to her beautiful hair.
Won’t you come with me? The faerie enticed us,
Stop by the hearth of the potter this day...

Brooding I pondered, could faeries be trusted?
Should I be swayed from the pathway assigned?
Yet I had watched how my reason surrendered
So before airs of a beautiful kind….

Loathe to offend such a glorious being,
One who had offered with kindness and grace,
Help just when needed. I bowed to the faerie;
Take now your highness my reason away.

Then the wind changed as a wandering mistral,
Warm as the breeze on a meadow of wheat,
Swift, warm and golden the faerie-bird air-borne
Flew o’er myself that fell under her wing.

Passed by all time as I sailed down the sleep-stream,
Far to the land where the doe and stag graze.
Home to the garden that blooms East of Eden,
Land of the ancestors covered in praise.

Opened my eyes as I reached the cool garden
Wonder-filled, wide, as memories unfolded.
Looked up the stag and the doe from their incline,
Wakened my self from the river of time.

Safe in the knowledge of paradise tended,
Turned I my thought to the reason once lost.
So in a blink of my eye I went searching,
Straight to the hearth of the faerie-bird’s host.

Lake of Memory

“Have a drink on me,” says Chiron
“Trouble not your self with worry.
Stand I guard; the heart of darkness
Sits behind me, far beyond thee.

“Child of Earth and Starry Heaven –
Lake of Memory; shun the cypress!”
From the stream that’s clear as crystal
Drinks Orion, knows he’s timeless.

‘“If I’m made to stand here waiting –
Forced by ties which bind, eternal -”
Hale Orion roars in fury,
“My revenge shall wax infernal!

‘”Long for I the Winter solstice,
When the Sea Goat meets the Sun King.
On that day the horn of plenty
Brims. How long will this event be?

‘“Might of oceans, old Poseidon,
Let the fishes swim beside me?
Lest you grant this one diversion,
I shall die of boredom, nightly.

“Tell me this, as well, oh wise one,
When does Hades mete out mercy,
When young Eros drinks the ocean,
Aphrodite reaches thirty?

‘”Hestia’s hearth is icy cold,
Or Hermes sighs and says, ‘I’m old;’
Hera gives her heart to Echo,
Atlas cries and lets the Earth go?”

Sweet Selene

‘Now a voice so fair, ascending,
Fills the air with love unending,
Rises on the silver moonbeams
Woven from Apollo’s sun streams.

‘”Bold Orion, Starman leaping,
How my heart for you is beating.
I have set you there so thy fame
Lights the path of this, the sky-train!”

‘Next she calls with gentle words
The creatures of her wooded world,
Speaks to them with tender charm
To keep the slightest safe from harm.

‘“Sweet you are as honey, bee.
Bear and Stag, come follow me.
Jump with me across the river.”
Seeks she souls with bow and quiver.

‘Then the Goddess steps up on it –
Disc of night, the lamp of dreamers –
As the steeds with hooves of onyx
Take to flight with sweet Selene.

Twelve Wise Men

In these twelve men who came together to perform a special mission, the twelve different streams in the spiritual development of mankind were represented. The fact that all possible religions and all possible philosophies belong to the twelve basic types is in itself a mystery.

Buddhism, Brahmanism, Vedanta philosophy, materialism, or whatever it may be – all of them can be traced to the twelve basic types; it is just a matter of being quite exact. And so all the different streams of man’s spiritual life – the religions, the philosophies and world conceptions that are spread over the earth – were united in that council of the twelve.

After the period of darkness had passed and spiritual achievement was possible again, a thirteenth came in remarkable circumstances to the twelve. I am telling you now of one of those events which takes place secretly in the evolution of mankind once and once only. They cannot occur a second time and are mentioned not as an indication that efforts should be made to repeat them but for quite other reasons.

When the darkness had lifted and it was possible to develop clairvoyant vision again, the coming of the thirteenth was announced in a mysterious way to the twelve wise men. They knew that the time had come when a child with significant and remarkable incarnations behind him was to be born. Above all they knew that one of his incarnations had been at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It was known, therefore, that one who had been a contemporary of the events in Palestine was returning. And the birth of the child in these unusual circumstances during the thirteenth century could not have been said to be that of a person of renown.

Rudolf Steiner, Intimate Workings of Karma