Volume 175 of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, published under the title Mithras, gathers eighteen lectures he gave in Berlin between February and May of 1917, in the middle of the First World War. The volume holds two connected lecture cycles: the seven lectures of Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses and the ten lectures grouped as Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Speaking to members of the Anthroposophical Society during a time he repeatedly names as one of sorrow and trial, Steiner sets the inner life of the human soul against the wide backdrop of cosmic evolution, and he traces how the ancient Mithras Mysteries prepared humanity for the event he places at the center of earthly history.
Place in Steiner's Work
These lectures belong to the war years, a stretch when Steiner spoke often about death, about the dead, and about the responsibilities the living carry toward the spiritual world. The physical building at Dornach, which he calls the Group, was still taking shape, and he opens the first lecture by describing the carved figure of the Representative of Humanity standing between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. That image sets the tone for the whole volume, because Steiner is concerned throughout with the human being poised between opposing forces and asked to find balance.
The volume also sits at a turning point in his teaching about the return of Christ. Here he states plainly that the twentieth century must bring to humanity a vision of what he calls the etheric Christ, an appearance not in a physical body but in the life-forces that surround the earth. This theme, which he had begun to unfold in earlier years, receives some of its most direct expression in GA 175, and it gives the historical material on the ancient Mysteries its forward-looking edge.
"This twentieth century must bring to humanity the Vision of the etheric Christ."
Read alongside the lecture courses of the surrounding years, GA 175 shows Steiner working to connect the private inward life of the soul with the largest reaches of world history, refusing to let either dissolve into the other. The war forms the unspoken ground of every lecture. Steiner never turns the talks into commentary on the fighting, yet the weight of it presses on his choice of subject. He returns again and again to the dead and to the bond between them and the living, and he treats the study of the spirit not as a comfort but as a duty owed to a moment when so many were crossing the threshold of death at once. That pressure gives these Berlin lectures a gravity that sets them apart from the more systematic courses of the calmer years before.
The volume also marks a stage in Steiner's long effort to read history spiritually. Where a modern historian sees the decay of the pagan cults and the spread of a new faith as a chain of social causes, Steiner reads the same centuries as a shift in the very way human beings could reach the divine. GA 175 is one of the clearer statements of that method, because it holds an ancient Mystery cult and a modern spiritual task in a single frame and asks the listener to see them as two points on one long arc.
Themes and Structure
The first cycle, Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses, opens with a lecture contrasting materialism and spirituality, then moves through the metamorphoses of the soul-forces, the relation of the human soul to the universe, morality as a germinating force, and the boundary between error and truth. Steiner is interested in how thinking, feeling, and willing change their character as they pass between waking life, sleep, and the condition after death. He argues that the forces active in the human soul are the same forces at work in the cosmos, viewed from a different vantage point, and that moral life is not a private ornament but a seed that ripens into future worlds.
The second cycle, the ten Building Stones lectures, turns to history. Steiner examines how the peoples of the ancient world approached the divine, and he gives particular attention to the Mithras cult that spread across the Roman world. He treats the sacrificial rites of the Mithras Mysteries not as crude superstition but as a disciplined, if now closed, path by which older humanity reached an instinctive knowledge of the forces working in nature and in the human being. He contrasts this waning clairvoyant capacity with the new spiritual method proper to the modern age, one that rises through clear thinking rather than through inherited trance.
Steiner is careful to distinguish the older sacrificial knowledge from anything a modern person should attempt. The point of retelling how the Mithras priests worked is not to recommend their practices but to show what was lost when that instinctive road to the spirit closed, and what has to be built in its place. He frames the entire Roman episode, including the imperial edicts against the old temples, as the visible surface of a deeper change in human consciousness. The decline of the ancient clairvoyance was not a defeat but a necessary emptying, one that made room for the freedom and clear thinking that mark the modern soul. This is why he treats the Mystery of Golgotha as the hinge of the whole story: it stands at the moment when the old participation in the divine gives way to a bond that must now be reached by inner freedom rather than by inherited vision.
Woven through these lectures is a teaching Steiner develops with unusual care: the soul's rhythmic encounters with the spiritual world across different spans of time. He describes a nightly meeting during sleep, when the sleeping soul draws near to its own higher spirit; a yearly meeting carried in the turning of the seasons, bound up with the descent and return of the sun; and a rarer meeting that comes once across a lifetime, usually somewhere between the late twenties and the early forties, when a person may sense the presence of the founding source of the world. Each meeting works on a different layer of the human being, and most pass unregistered by waking consciousness. Steiner ties this last, lifetime meeting to questions of education, to the fate of those who die young, and to the fruits a soul carries with it into the life between death and a new birth.
These meetings tie the Building Stones cycle back to the concerns of the first cycle, since they show the ordinary human biography shot through with spiritual events most people never notice. The rhythms of sleeping and waking, of summer and winter, of youth and maturity, are not merely biological facts in this reading but occasions on which the soul touches worlds it cannot see. The whole volume asks the reader to grow attentive to what the modern mind has learned to overlook, and to understand the small daily and yearly turnings of a life as the outer face of an inner history that reaches far beyond the single earthly span.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Two entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 175. Each collects and defines a teaching that Steiner gives in these Berlin lectures, and each links back to this volume as its primary source. This study guide serves as the hub for both.
The Mithras Mysteries The Three Meetings
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of both the Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses and Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha cycles that make up this volume. For a printed edition, or to see which translations are currently available, search the publisher's catalog at SteinerBooks. Note that the two cycles in GA 175 have appeared in English under several titles over the years, so it helps to search by the individual cycle names as well as by the volume number.
Continue Your Study
If this volume draws you in, several paths lead onward:
- Begin with the two terms above, then browse the full Steiner glossary to see how the teachings of GA 175 connect to Steiner's wider vocabulary.
- Follow the theme of the returning Christ and the ancient Mysteries through related entries in the glossary collection, where the Mithras material links outward to the history of the Mystery centers.
- Sit with the idea of the three meetings as a lens on your own biography, noticing where sleep, the seasons, and the middle years might carry more than they seem to.