Chthonic mysteries

Chthonic mysteries (from Greek: ἡ χϑών "the ground", or χϑόνιος "belonging to the ground", also meaning subterranean, belonging to the underworld) point the way to the lower, the chthonic gods.

„Already in Greek times, man had to enter into a relationship with those forces to which one comes into a relationship when one develops in the direction of the constellations that are below the earth.

This is wonderfully intimate in the Greek myth. For in Greek myths you are always told of a certain kind of initiation: The person concerned descended into the underworld. - Of certain Greek heroes you can always know that he experiences initiation when it is said of him that he descended into the underworld. That is to say, he got to know those forces of the cosmos that work through the earth, he got to know the chthonic forces [...].

In Greece one began to know that which depends on the earth itself: Uranus and Gäa. Gaea, the Earth, is the starting point of Greek cosmology. And the Greek always sought to know the mysteries of the Earth itself, which are of course also the cosmic mysteries that work through the Earth. But the Greek also wanted to get to know the mysteries of the actual underworld. And so a real cosmology developed in Greece [...].

Just as once men only turned their knowledge to the upper worlds - which you can well observe in the position of the Buddha - just as afterwards, in order to arrive at a cosmology, men read it off from the development of the earth and were initiated into the Greek, chthonic mysteries, which the Greek myth recounts again and again in significant, outstanding places, so, after men have thus studied the secrets of heaven and the secrets of earth in the old initiatory science, we need a modern initiatory science which can, as it were, move backwards and forwards in rhythm between heaven and earth, which asks heaven when it wants to have information about earth, and asks earth when it wants to have information about heaven.“ (Lit.:GA 214, p. 186ff)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: The Mystery of the Trinity. Mission of the Spirit. 8 lectures in Dornach, Oxford, and London, July and August 1922. CW 214. Steiner Books 2016. ISBN 978-1621480952

German

• Rudolf Steiner: Das Geheimnis der Trinität, GA 214 (1999), ISBN 3-7274-2140-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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