Son of the Widow
Son of the Widow is a designation attributed to many initiates of the post-Atlantean period, e.g. the Youth of Nain, awakened by the Christ, who had formerly been the Youth of Sais and was later reborn as Mani and then as Parzival, or Hiram Abif, the master builder of Solomon's Temple. This refers to the human soul that has been abandoned by the divine, that is, widowed, as it were, and that must seek the light of truth within itself in order to be able to give birth to the spiritual in individual form anew. At a certain point, the Egyptian initiates could no longer find the living word of the world, Osiris, next to his sister and wife Isis, and resigned themselves to being the sons of the widow. This had come about because Moses had taken the mystery secrets of Osiris, into which he had been initiated, with him when the people of Israel left Egypt. This enabled Moses to experience the "I Am" on Sinai. (Lit.:GA 144, p. 45ff)
„If we go back to the most ancient times, which lie before our present root race, the way in which people recognised, acquired knowledge, was different. You will see from my description of the Atlantean time, and now, when the next "Lucifer" booklet appears, also from the description of the Lemurian time, that at that time all knowledge - partly up to our time - was influenced by that which is above humanity. I have often mentioned that only the Manu who will appear in the next root-race will be a real human brother, whereas the earlier Manus were superhuman, a kind of divine being. Only now is humanity maturing to have its own human brother as Manu, who has gone through all the stages from the middle of Lemurian times. So what actually happens during the development of the fifth root-race? What happens is that this Revelation, the Revelation from above, the guidance of the soul from above, gradually withdraws and leaves humanity to its own ways, so that it becomes its own leader. The soul has now been called the "mother" in all esotericism (mysticism); the instructor the "father". Father and mother, Osiris and Isis, these are the two powers present in the soul: the instructor, the one who represents the immediate inflowing Divine, Osiris, is the father; the soul itself, Isis, conceived, receives the Divine-Spiritual, she is the mother. During the fifth root race, the father now withdraws. The soul is widowed, shall be widowed. Humanity is dependent on itself. It must seek in its own soul the light of truth to guide itself. All that is soulful has always been expressed with female symbols. That is why this soul - which is present today in germ and will be fully developed later - this self-directing soul, which no longer has the divine fertiliser before it, that is called "widow" by the Mani. And that is why he called himself the 'son of the widow'.“ (Lit.:GA 93, p. 72f)
The masters of the Freemasons, who derive from the Manichaeans, call themselves Children of the Widow (Lit.:GA 93, p. 85).
Literature
- Rudolf Steiner: Die Tempellegende und die Goldene Legende , GA 93 (1991) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
- Rudolf Steiner: Die Mysterien des Morgenlandes und des Christentums, GA 144 (1985) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
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